G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

G. K. Chesterton
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

G. K. Chesterton
There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

G. K. Chesterton
The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.

G. K. Chesterton
The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

G. K. Chesterton
The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

G. K. Chesterton
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

G. K. Chesterton
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

G. K. Chesterton
Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

G. K. Chesterton
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

G. K. Chesterton
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

G. K. Chesterton
My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.

G. K. Chesterton
There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.

G. K. Chesterton
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

G. K. Chesterton
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

G. K. Chesterton
Paradox has been defined as Truth standing on her head to get attention.

G. K. Chesterton
Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.

G. K. Chesterton
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

G. K. Chesterton
Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

G. K. Chesterton
When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

G. K. Chesterton
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

G. K. Chesterton
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

G. K. Chesterton
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

G. K. Chesterton
Yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.

G. K. Chesterton
It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.

G. K. Chesterton
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

G. K. Chesterton
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight us by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
And they look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; And they know no songs.

G. K. Chesterton
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

G. K. Chesterton
People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

G. K. Chesterton
When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

G. K. Chesterton