G. K. Chesterton - Man Quotes

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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
It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

G. K. Chesterton
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

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
A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

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
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
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
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
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

G. K. Chesterton
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

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
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
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
It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.

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
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

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
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

G. K. Chesterton
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

G. K. Chesterton