G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.

G. K. Chesterton
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

G. K. Chesterton
The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

G. K. Chesterton
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

G. K. Chesterton
In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad, but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

G. K. Chesterton
If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

G. K. Chesterton
And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

G. K. Chesterton
A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

G. K. Chesterton
Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.

G. K. Chesterton
We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

G. K. Chesterton
The difficulty of explaining 'why I am a Catholic' is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

G. K. Chesterton
The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

G. K. Chesterton
A machine is a machine because it cannot think.

G. K. Chesterton
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

G. K. Chesterton
Oh with what prayers and fasting Shall mortal man deserve To see that glimpse of Heaven.

G. K. Chesterton
A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

G. K. Chesterton
What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

G. K. Chesterton
The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically
means being wrong

G. K. Chesterton
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms [the child] to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

G. K. Chesterton
Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

G. K. Chesterton
If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think it wrong.

G. K. Chesterton
For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions - the idea of property... Property is merely the art of the democracy... One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake.

G. K. Chesterton
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.

G. K. Chesterton
The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones, and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.

G. K. Chesterton
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

G. K. Chesterton
And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

G. K. Chesterton
Comradeship is obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection; it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal.

G. K. Chesterton
People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

G. K. Chesterton