G.K. Chesterton Quotes & Sayings

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe. — G.K. Chesterton

A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat. — G.K. Chesterton

Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative. — G.K. Chesterton

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. — G.K. Chesterton

Americans ... are the most idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator. — 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

It seems to me,' said the other, 'That you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.'
By George!' said Syme facing round and looking at him, 'What a clever chap you are! — G.K. Chesterton

His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes. — G.K. Chesterton

All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion. — G.K. Chesterton

We are rarely in danger of examining to excess, especially when the subject is the shape of our own lives. — G.K. Chesterton

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. — G.K. Chesterton

An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races. — G.K. Chesterton

War in the wide modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because more men agree. — G.K. Chesterton

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do? — G.K. Chesterton

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. — G.K. Chesterton

What happens when everyone is asleep is called Evolution. What happens when everyone is awake is called Revolution. — G.K. Chesterton

The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings. — G.K. Chesterton

Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil? — G.K. Chesterton

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. — G.K. Chesterton

It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus — G.K. Chesterton

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. — G.K. Chesterton

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. — G.K. Chesterton

For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. — G.K. Chesterton

The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god. — G.K. Chesterton

I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue. — G.K. Chesterton

I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack. — G.K. Chesterton

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. — G.K. Chesterton

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. — G.K. Chesterton

The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method. But — G.K. Chesterton

What makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. — G.K. Chesterton

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. — G.K. Chesterton

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation. — G.K. Chesterton

In a word, God paints in many colors; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic period. Which is not the case.
Meanwhile I could not find my chalk. — G.K. Chesterton

It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude. — G.K. Chesterton

But this larger and more adventurous Christian universe has one final mark difficult to express; yet as a conclusion of the whole matter I will attempt to express — G.K. Chesterton

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was. — G.K. Chesterton

however, that the controversies left Summers Minor comparatively — G.K. Chesterton

The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's. — G.K. Chesterton

What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. — G.K. Chesterton

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws. — G.K. Chesterton

A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. — G.K. Chesterton

What are we going to do?" asked the Professor.
"At this moment," said Syme, with a scientific detachment, "I think we are going to smash into a lamppost. — G.K. Chesterton

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

General theories are everywhere condemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters
except everything. — G.K. Chesterton

It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation. — G.K. Chesterton

His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake. — G.K. Chesterton

Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street. — G.K. Chesterton

There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel. — G.K. Chesterton

In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd. — G.K. Chesterton

[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. — G.K. Chesterton

No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick. — G.K. Chesterton

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak. — G.K. Chesterton

You can't be angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong - why one thirsts for his blood. — G.K. Chesterton

For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare. — G.K. Chesterton

To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him; but in that case, why not call him a Saint? But if he is merely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for all the strength we have. If we are weaker than he, that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own. — G.K. Chesterton

All women dress to be noticed: gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed. — G.K. Chesterton

In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone. — G.K. Chesterton

Now in sober truth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused. Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex and more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I like them beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and there is (literally) the devil to pay
to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the appearance of a man. — G.K. Chesterton

She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. Ine modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy. — G.K. Chesterton

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

We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence. — G.K. Chesterton

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason. — G.K. Chesterton

I cannot imagine why it is that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical? — G.K. Chesterton

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves. — G.K. Chesterton

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 to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. — G.K. Chesterton

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy ... .The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities ... To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back. — G.K. Chesterton

How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them. — G.K. Chesterton

A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. — G.K. Chesterton

The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own thoughts; he sat with knotted brow and then said abruptly: 'You see, it's so easy to be misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe. — G.K. Chesterton

A kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name. CHAPTER III. - The Suicide — G.K. Chesterton

Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert-himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason ... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether. — G.K. Chesterton

Try to grow straight, and life will bend you. — G.K. Chesterton

Job is an optimist. He shakes the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak. — G.K. Chesterton

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. — G.K. Chesterton

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. — G.K. Chesterton

This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age. — G.K. Chesterton

It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary. — G.K. Chesterton

All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. — G.K. Chesterton

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life. — G.K. Chesterton

The obvious thing to say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome if he had not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be a rather bald way of putting it. Fantastic as it sounds, it would fit the case better to say that people would have been surprised to see hair growing on him; as surprised as if they had found hair growing on the bust of a Roman emperor. — G.K. Chesterton

The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God. — G.K. Chesterton

We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There — G.K. Chesterton

There is a tradition that jumping off a precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. And the tradition is thereby mocked - to the peril of us all. — G.K. Chesterton

I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face - an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran. — G.K. Chesterton

Can you not see, [ ... ] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. — G.K. Chesterton

And the greatest of the poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name. — G.K. Chesterton

The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. — G.K. Chesterton

When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloud-band left and right; unbarring great clear furnaces of rolling gold. — G.K. Chesterton

the two priests were talking exactly like priests, piously, with learning and leisure, about the most aerial enigmas of theology. The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. — G.K. Chesterton

Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary impatiently; "why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing. There aren't any men. There are no such people. There's a man; and whoever he is he's quite different. — G.K. Chesterton

For he was a sincere man, and in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely. — G.K. Chesterton

Let us then, by all means, be proud of the virtues that we have not got; but let us not be too arrogant about the virtues that we cannot help having. It — G.K. Chesterton

The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. — G.K. Chesterton

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles. — G.K. Chesterton

The psychological substance of the whole thing has altered; the marble has turned to ice; and the ice has melted with most amazing rapidity. The Church was right to refuse even the exception. The world has admitted the exception; and the exception has become the rule. — G.K. Chesterton

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. — G.K. Chesterton

The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge-pole. — G.K. Chesterton

I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. — G.K. Chesterton

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. — G.K. Chesterton

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem. — G.K. Chesterton