G. K. Chesterton - Man Quotes

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

G. K. Chesterton
A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

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

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

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
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

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
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

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
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
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
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
The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

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

G. K. Chesterton
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

G. K. Chesterton
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

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
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
Men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

G. K. Chesterton
The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.

G. K. Chesterton
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

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