G.K. Chesterton Quotes
Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong... A stiff apology is a second insult.
Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.
the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
No man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.
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.
Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.
A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is.
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.
The more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.
Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.
The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.
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 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 perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
