G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

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

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.

The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.

And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.

But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.

Shouldn't atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.

Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship. . .

Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .

Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.