Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (141 Quotes)

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

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.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

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.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

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.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

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

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

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

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

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

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.