G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

G. K. Chesterton
And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

G. K. Chesterton
If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

G. K. Chesterton
In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad, but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

G. K. Chesterton
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

G. K. Chesterton
The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

G. K. Chesterton
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

G. K. Chesterton
The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.

G. K. Chesterton
The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

G. K. Chesterton
The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

G. K. Chesterton
One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

G. K. Chesterton
But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

G. K. Chesterton
They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

G. K. Chesterton
A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like.

G. K. Chesterton
It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

G. K. Chesterton
I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

G. K. Chesterton
It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

G. K. Chesterton
Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.

G. K. Chesterton
The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

G. K. Chesterton
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

G. K. Chesterton
All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

G. K. Chesterton
For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value of any of them is that they bear the image of the king.

G. K. Chesterton
It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.

G. K. Chesterton
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

G. K. Chesterton
'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

G. K. Chesterton
Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

G. K. Chesterton
The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the
gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is
the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the
universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The
fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things
are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial.

G. K. Chesterton
The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

G. K. Chesterton
If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.

G. K. Chesterton