G. K. Chesterton - Life Quotes

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Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

G. K. Chesterton
Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

G. K. Chesterton
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

G. K. Chesterton
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

G. K. Chesterton
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.

G. K. Chesterton
It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

G. K. Chesterton
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

G. K. Chesterton
The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something - war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.

G. K. Chesterton
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

G. K. Chesterton
If [human life] depends on anything, it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow.
On the promise

G. K. Chesterton
We can't turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

G. K. Chesterton
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

G. K. Chesterton
Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my adventures and my champagne dry.

G. K. Chesterton
He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion.

G. K. Chesterton
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

G. K. Chesterton
Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

G. K. Chesterton
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

G. K. Chesterton
What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

G. K. Chesterton
There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

G. K. Chesterton
There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

G. K. Chesterton
There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.

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
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
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

G. K. Chesterton