G. K. Chesterton - Man Quotes

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Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

G. K. Chesterton
An archaeologist is a man who studies old things and finds they are new.

G. K. Chesterton
I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.

G. K. Chesterton
And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

G. K. Chesterton
The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.

G. K. Chesterton
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

G. K. Chesterton
Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

G. K. Chesterton
There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.... A stiff apology is a second insult.

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
I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

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
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

G. K. Chesterton
The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.

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
It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.

G. K. Chesterton
The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

G. K. Chesterton
Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

G. K. Chesterton
But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.

G. K. Chesterton
The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

G. K. Chesterton
Men That Are Men Again: Who goes home?
Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home?
For there's blood on the grass and blood on the foam,
And blood on the body, when Man comes home.
And A Voice Valedictory: Who is for victory?
Who is for liberty?
Who goes home?

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
Your next-door neighbour…is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

G. K. Chesterton
The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

G. K. Chesterton
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
A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.

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

G. K. Chesterton
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

G. K. Chesterton
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

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