G. K. Chesterton - Man Quotes

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

G. K. Chesterton
Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

G. K. Chesterton
It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

G. K. Chesterton
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

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
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
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

G. K. Chesterton
There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

G. K. Chesterton
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.

G. K. Chesterton
Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart.

G. K. Chesterton
Oh with what prayers and fasting Shall mortal man deserve To see that glimpse of Heaven.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

G. K. Chesterton
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

G. K. Chesterton
All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

G. K. Chesterton
To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

G. K. Chesterton
If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

G. K. Chesterton
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

G. K. Chesterton
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any triviality.

G. K. Chesterton
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

G. K. Chesterton
Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

G. K. Chesterton
Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkenness — or so good as drink.

G. K. Chesterton
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

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
I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

G. K. Chesterton
Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

G. K. Chesterton