G.K. Chesterton Quotes

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

The strangest whim has seized me ... After all I think I will not hang myself today.

Hope means expectancy when things are otherwise hopeless.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.

I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.

The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

There is no such thing as Success....That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey.

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .

The wine they drink in Paradise They make in Haute Lorraine.

Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy.

The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

We're all in the same boat, and we're all seasick.

If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.

Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.