G.k. Chesterton

Quotes

• “Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on...”
• “We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism ...”
• “A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and di...”
• “The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the ...”
• “Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly...”
• “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children ...”
• “We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thou...”
• “It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they h...”
• “No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's educ...”
• “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on s...”
• “But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce m...”
• “The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the ...”
• “As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it fi...”
• “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same peo...”
• “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 re...”
• “That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”
• “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
• “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
• “There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
• “The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.”
• “Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
• “Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”
• “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
• “I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller”
• “All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.”
• “Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”
• “Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”
• “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”
• “A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
• “Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”
• “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”
• “Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.”
• “Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.”
• “I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.”
• “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
• “Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”