G.K. Chesterton Quotes
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.
He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.
St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.
What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.
There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.
The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.
He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.
A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.
Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.
By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.