G. K. Chesterton - Real Quotes

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The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

G. K. Chesterton
All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out.

G. K. Chesterton
If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

G. K. Chesterton
This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

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
Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.

G. K. Chesterton
We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

G. K. Chesterton
I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

G. K. Chesterton
And I will add this point of merely personal experience of humanity: when men have a real explanation they explain it, eagerly and copiously and in common speech, as Huxley freely gave it when he thought he had it. When they have no explanation to offer, they give short dignified replies, disdainful of the ignorance of the multitude.

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
I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.

G. K. Chesterton
But this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

G. K. Chesterton
I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.

G. K. Chesterton
The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.

G. K. Chesterton
There is nothing wrong with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

G. K. Chesterton
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

G. K. Chesterton
Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

G. K. Chesterton
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

G. K. Chesterton
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.... It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wilderness lies in wait.

G. K. Chesterton
There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

G. K. Chesterton
But out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

G. K. Chesterton
It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

G. K. Chesterton
The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

G. K. Chesterton