G. K. Chesterton Quotes

844 Sourced Quotes

One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling.

G. K. Chesterton
Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

G. K. Chesterton
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.

G. K. Chesterton
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.

G. K. Chesterton
A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.

G. K. Chesterton
Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

G. K. Chesterton
Digestion exists for health, and health exists for life, and life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

G. K. Chesterton
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

G. K. Chesterton
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton
The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

G. K. Chesterton
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

G. K. Chesterton
There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.

G. K. Chesterton
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

G. K. Chesterton
The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

G. K. Chesterton
No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be...

G. K. Chesterton
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

G. K. Chesterton
When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

G. K. Chesterton
But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.

G. K. Chesterton
Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

G. K. Chesterton
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

G. K. Chesterton
I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

G. K. Chesterton
An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

G. K. Chesterton
The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

G. K. Chesterton
Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

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

G. K. Chesterton