GK Chesterton's quotes

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it has a God who knows the way out of the grave.

You are free in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He exists and is evil; you are free to say like Renan that He would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one’s conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer.

For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking- point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.I do not insist on my suggestion of a benevolent millionaire paying off those people who seem naturally designed to be murdered. But I do insist that they will be murdered, sooner or later, if we accept in every department the principle of the easiest way out.

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

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.

The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttlefish.

Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.

When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals.

They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.

The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind.

When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.

To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities The past is not what it was.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God. The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.

He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.

All government is an ugly necessity. It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly.

It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all.

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

It has been often said, very truely, 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.

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.

Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

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.

The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

There are some desires that are not desirable.

In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.

Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.

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

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

Our materialistic masters could, and probably will, put Birth Control into an immediate practical programme while we are all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant Utopia.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to describe as Self-Examination.

The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?

From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end.

The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.

The ultimate effect of the great science of Fingerprints is this: that whereas a gentleman was expected to put on gloves to dance with a lady, he may now be expected to put on gloves in order to strangle her.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.

>An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

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

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

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

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

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

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.

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

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

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

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.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

A yawn is a silent shout.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

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

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.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.<

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

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

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

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

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

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

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, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

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

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

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.

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

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.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not

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 to publish it.<

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

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.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization. Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

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.

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.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

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.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

New roads; new ruts.

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

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

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

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.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

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 fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

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

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

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

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

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist.He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

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

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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

T he present condition of fame is merely fashion.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

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

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

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

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 foreign land.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

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.

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

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

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

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

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

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.

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.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

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

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

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

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.

For under the smooth legal surface of our society, there are already moving, very lawless things. We are always near the breaking point, when we care for only what is legal, and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.

The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.

For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferably to another.

Paganism is free to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to pretend, in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine.

There is only one reason an intelligent man does not believe in miracles. He or she believe in materialism.

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it, you cannot look at anything else.