G.K. Chesterton

Quotes

• “The obvious thing to say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome if he had not been entirely ba...”
• “What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon ...”
• “I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it...”
• “There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which ...”
• “The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain and tedium that...”
• “I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever...”
• “One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys...”
• “Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows...”
• “It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor ma...”
• “I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who...”
• “A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes th...”
• “Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolatio...”
• “But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry,...”
• “But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracle...”
• “For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If p...”
• “If I had one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence...the more I am convinced...”
• “The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards...”
• “The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. Because he bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest ob...”
• “In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather th...”
• “It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide myste...”
• “Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this [man's] happy and c...”
• “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players ...”
• “Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity ...”
• “Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I...”
• “There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered co...”
• “A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungover...”
• “He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The c...”
• “The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sover...”
• “...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison me...”
• “Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or...”
• “Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa...”
• “If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the g...”
• “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 ...”
• “There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they ...”
• “Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of th...”
• “Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. T...”
• “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen....”
• “As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited b...”
• “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more t...”
• “Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere...”
• “The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chi...”
• “She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into h...”
• “She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into h...”
• “The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and ...”
• “Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will...”
• “Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back;...”
• “He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the rig...”
• “The real difference between Francis and Dominic, which is no discredit to either of them, is that Dominic did happen to ...”
• “As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain l...”
• “Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you ca...”