G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

G. K. Chesterton
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

G. K. Chesterton
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

G. K. Chesterton
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

G. K. Chesterton
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

G. K. Chesterton
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

G. K. Chesterton
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

G. K. Chesterton