G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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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
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
Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

G. K. Chesterton
That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon. There are certain intellectuals who are too bright to be content with merely praising peace but who are infuriated by anybody praising war. If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance

G. K. Chesterton
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

G. K. Chesterton
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

G. K. Chesterton
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

G. K. Chesterton
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

G. K. Chesterton
A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

G. K. Chesterton
The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation, and admired for the wrong reasons.

G. K. Chesterton
A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane...

G. K. Chesterton
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

G. K. Chesterton
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

G. K. Chesterton
Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

G. K. Chesterton
Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.

G. K. Chesterton
Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

G. K. Chesterton
Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.

G. K. Chesterton
If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple.

G. K. Chesterton
The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

G. K. Chesterton
We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

G. K. Chesterton
To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.

G. K. Chesterton
Digestion exists for health, and health exists for life, and life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

G. K. Chesterton
When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

G. K. Chesterton
How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

G. K. Chesterton
Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

G. K. Chesterton
To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

G. K. Chesterton
Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.

G. K. Chesterton
I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

G. K. Chesterton