G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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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
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
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
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

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
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

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

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

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
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

G. K. Chesterton
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

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

G. K. Chesterton
The simplification of anything is always sensational.

G. K. Chesterton
But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

G. K. Chesterton
Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes—that they have done for some time past—they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. … I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

G. K. Chesterton
In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

G. K. Chesterton
It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

G. K. Chesterton
He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

G. K. Chesterton
No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

G. K. Chesterton
The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

G. K. Chesterton
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

G. K. Chesterton
The strangest whim has seized me…. After all
I think I will not hang myself today.

G. K. Chesterton
Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.

G. K. Chesterton
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

G. K. Chesterton
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

G. K. Chesterton