G. K. Chesterton Quotes

844 Sourced Quotes

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

G. K. Chesterton
You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

G. K. Chesterton
One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

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
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
Children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.

G. K. Chesterton
Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.

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

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
The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

G. K. Chesterton
Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

G. K. Chesterton
I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.

G. K. Chesterton
Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America..

G. K. Chesterton
Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand."

G. K. Chesterton
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any triviality.

G. K. Chesterton
The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

G. K. Chesterton
The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

G. K. Chesterton
Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

G. K. Chesterton
A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.

G. K. Chesterton
Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.

G. K. Chesterton
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.

G. K. Chesterton
I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

G. K. Chesterton
In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

G. K. Chesterton