Gilbert K. Chesterton

Quotes

• “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 h...”
• “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 g...”
• “Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself th...”
• “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Traditi...”
• “The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards,...”
• “Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men,...”
• “All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If yo...”
• “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 ...”
• “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to G...”
• “True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is ...”
• “I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so ...”
• “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...”
• “My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like sayi...”
• “The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying th...”
• “In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought ...”
• “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreig...”
• “Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the r...”
• “The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himsel...”
• “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it...”
• “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
• “Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”
• “Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
• “The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”
• “The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.”
• “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”
• “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
• “Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.”
• “A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.”
• “A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”
• “One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.”
• “Love means to love that which is unlovable or it is no virtue at all.”
• “The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
• “Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.”
• “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
• “I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”
• “All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”
• “Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.”
• “Half a truth is better than no politics.”