G. K. Chesterton - Man Quotes

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The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

G. K. Chesterton
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

G. K. Chesterton
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

G. K. Chesterton
A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

G. K. Chesterton
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

G. K. Chesterton
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste... if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.

G. K. Chesterton
No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

G. K. Chesterton
If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

G. K. Chesterton
A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it.

G. K. Chesterton
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

G. K. Chesterton
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

G. K. Chesterton
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

G. K. Chesterton
Half the trouble about the modern man is that he is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.

G. K. Chesterton
If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

G. K. Chesterton
If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

G. K. Chesterton
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

G. K. Chesterton
Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.

G. K. Chesterton
"Proof ! " he cried. Good God! the man is looking for proof! Why, of course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing to do with them. But what else can we do? Don't you see we must either follow one wild possibility or else go home to bed.

G. K. Chesterton
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

G. K. Chesterton
Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man.

G. K. Chesterton
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

G. K. Chesterton
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

G. K. Chesterton
The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

G. K. Chesterton
That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

G. K. Chesterton