G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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

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
If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple.

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

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

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

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
There may be a broken trail of stones and bones faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

G. K. Chesterton
There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.

G. K. Chesterton
Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

G. K. Chesterton
A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle.

G. K. Chesterton
I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.

G. K. Chesterton
All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

G. K. Chesterton
Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring.

G. K. Chesterton
The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell...

G. K. Chesterton
A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is.

G. K. Chesterton
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

G. K. Chesterton
The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

G. K. Chesterton
And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages-Might as well talk about prudent suicides.

G. K. Chesterton
Aesthetics never do anything but what they are told.

G. K. Chesterton
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste... if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.

G. K. Chesterton
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

G. K. Chesterton
Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.

G. K. Chesterton
An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

G. K. Chesterton
We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.

G. K. Chesterton
Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

G. K. Chesterton
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.

G. K. Chesterton
Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

G. K. Chesterton