G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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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
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

G. K. Chesterton
My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

G. K. Chesterton
Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

G. K. Chesterton
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

G. K. Chesterton
Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

G. K. Chesterton
When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

G. K. Chesterton
A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. … The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.

G. K. Chesterton
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.

G. K. Chesterton
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

G. K. Chesterton
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

G. K. Chesterton
A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

G. K. Chesterton
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

G. K. Chesterton
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

G. K. Chesterton
In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it—or he would be obviously below it.

G. K. Chesterton
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

G. K. Chesterton
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.

G. K. Chesterton
The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

G. K. Chesterton
Anonymous journalism is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is so rapidly becoming an anonymous life. That is the horrible thing about our contemporary atmosphere. Society is becoming a secret society.

G. K. Chesterton
All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

G. K. Chesterton
All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable....

G. K. Chesterton