G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.

To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.

He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Daybreak is a never-ending glory; getting out of bed is a never ending nuisance.

The center of every man's existence is a dream.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.

What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world... The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.

We can’t turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

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

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee.

The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

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

Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.