G.K. Chesterton Quotes

Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

Atheism is too theological.

Progress is the mother of all problems.

Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.

The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.

Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

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

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

Teach to the young, men's enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors.

Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.

My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.

People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

Theology is only thought applied to religion.

It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

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

Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.

The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.

The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.

To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.

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

There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.

The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.

Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.

Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.

The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.

A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

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

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.