G. K. Chesterton Quotes

844 Sourced Quotes

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
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

G. K. Chesterton
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

G. K. Chesterton
Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

G. K. Chesterton
Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

G. K. Chesterton
If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

G. K. Chesterton
It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

G. K. Chesterton
He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

G. K. Chesterton
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

G. K. Chesterton
When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

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

G. K. Chesterton
We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.

G. K. Chesterton
A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

G. K. Chesterton
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

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

G. K. Chesterton
I've searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.

G. K. Chesterton
Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.

G. K. Chesterton
The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.

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
The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

G. K. Chesterton
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath). And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain.

G. K. Chesterton
In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

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
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

G. K. Chesterton