Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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

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

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

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

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.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

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

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.

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

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

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

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

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.

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.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

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.

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.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.