G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.

This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.

Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.

You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.

Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them.

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

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.

He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.

And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Satan fell by the force of gravity.

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.

The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.

When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you, be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition oflife.

It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.

An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things

We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.

To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.

A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

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.

[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love.

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

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.

Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.

The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers.

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.

That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that--rose against me like a towering blasphemy.

...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.

My country, right or wrong, ” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.

There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as the enormous importance attached to immediate victory.

If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.

I am not good at deception, ' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.Right, my boy, right, ' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.

When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read

no life of faith can be lived privately. There must be an overflow into the lives of others.

Oh, most unhappy man, ' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.'My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world, ' said Gregory.

I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it's a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

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

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.

Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

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