G. K. Chesterton Quotes

844 Sourced Quotes

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

G. K. Chesterton
A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.

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

G. K. Chesterton
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

G. K. Chesterton
We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

G. K. Chesterton
Betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance.

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
The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

G. K. Chesterton
Are they clinging to their crosses, F. E. Smith?

G. K. Chesterton
The old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.

G. K. Chesterton
He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

G. K. Chesterton
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

G. K. Chesterton
A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.

G. K. Chesterton
A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

G. K. Chesterton
In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.

G. K. Chesterton
The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.

G. K. Chesterton
These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

G. K. Chesterton
It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.

G. K. Chesterton
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

G. K. Chesterton
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

G. K. Chesterton
To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

G. K. Chesterton
Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.

G. K. Chesterton
The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.... The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.

G. K. Chesterton
I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.

G. K. Chesterton
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

G. K. Chesterton
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

G. K. Chesterton
He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.

G. K. Chesterton
The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.

G. K. Chesterton
But 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
Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?

G. K. Chesterton