G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended.

G. K. Chesterton
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

G. K. Chesterton
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

G. K. Chesterton
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

G. K. Chesterton
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

G. K. Chesterton
Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

G. K. Chesterton
It is all as of old, the empty clangour,
The NOTHING scrawled on a five-foot page,
The huckster who, mocking holy anger,
Painfully paints his face with rage.
…
We that fight till the world is free,
We have no comfort in victory;
We have read each other as Cain his brother,
We know each other, these slaves and we.

G. K. Chesterton
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

G. K. Chesterton
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

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

G. K. Chesterton
The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

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
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

G. K. Chesterton
Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

G. K. Chesterton
In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.

G. K. Chesterton
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

G. K. Chesterton
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

G. K. Chesterton
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

G. K. Chesterton
Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.

G. K. Chesterton
Paradox has been defined as Truth standing on her head to get attention.

G. K. Chesterton
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

G. K. Chesterton
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

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
My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.

G. K. Chesterton
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

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
The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

G. K. Chesterton
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

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
Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

G. K. Chesterton