G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

G. K. Chesterton
None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia... have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

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
There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

G. K. Chesterton
No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

G. K. Chesterton
If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

G. K. Chesterton
This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

G. K. Chesterton
Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

G. K. Chesterton
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

G. K. Chesterton
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

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
If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

G. K. Chesterton
They haven't got no noses
The fallen sons of Eve;
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes;
But more than mind discloses
And more than men believe.

G. K. Chesterton
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.

G. K. Chesterton
The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something - war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.

G. K. Chesterton
A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it.

G. K. Chesterton
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

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
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

G. K. Chesterton
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far (Don John of Austria is going to the war); Stiff flags straining in the night blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old gold; Torchlight crimson on the copper kettledrums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.

G. K. Chesterton
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

G. K. Chesterton
Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

G. K. Chesterton
He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.

G. K. Chesterton
Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas... for it is the assertion of a universal negative.

G. K. Chesterton