G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.

G. K. Chesterton
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

G. K. Chesterton
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

G. K. Chesterton
In the city set upon slime and loam,
They cry in their Parliament, "Who goes home?"
And there comes no answer in arch or dome,
For none in the city of graves goes home.
Yet these shall perish and understand,
For God has pity on this great land.

G. K. Chesterton
For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

G. K. Chesterton
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways.... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.

G. K. Chesterton
Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.' My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.

G. K. Chesterton
I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

G. K. Chesterton
His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.

G. K. Chesterton
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

G. K. Chesterton
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.

G. K. Chesterton
I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument.

G. K. Chesterton
We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

G. K. Chesterton
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

G. K. Chesterton
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

G. K. Chesterton
Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.

G. K. Chesterton
The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.

G. K. Chesterton
Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

G. K. Chesterton
Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

G. K. Chesterton
A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

G. K. Chesterton
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

G. K. Chesterton
We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

G. K. Chesterton
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

G. K. Chesterton
By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

G. K. Chesterton
The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

G. K. Chesterton
An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

G. K. Chesterton
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.

G. K. Chesterton
Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.

G. K. Chesterton