G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.

G. K. Chesterton
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

G. K. Chesterton
I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.

G. K. Chesterton
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.

G. K. Chesterton
Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

G. K. Chesterton
Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

G. K. Chesterton
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.

G. K. Chesterton
They died to save their country and they only saved the world.

G. K. Chesterton
A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

G. K. Chesterton
The deputation of distinguished geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like wearing their decorations so much as the men of science - as anybody knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society.

G. K. Chesterton
Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

G. K. Chesterton
But this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

G. K. Chesterton
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

G. K. Chesterton
It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.

G. K. Chesterton
A third-class carriage is a community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits.

G. K. Chesterton
Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

G. K. Chesterton
There are dark and morbid moods in which I am tempted to feel that Evil re-entered the world in the form of Essays. The Essay is like the Serpent, smooth and graceful and easy of movement, also wavering and wandering.

G. K. Chesterton
The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell...

G. K. Chesterton
Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass.

G. K. Chesterton
It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

G. K. Chesterton