Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.
Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.
Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.
A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.
The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle
The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.
There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.
A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is.
I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.
When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.
Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.
The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.
I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.
The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation, and admired for the wrong reasons.
If the world grows to worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows to worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldlyness by the world.
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.
My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.
A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy.
Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.
The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.
When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.
It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.
When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.
The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.
The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.
Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.
La mejor prueba de la cultura y la liberalidad de un hombre es su actitud ante las cosas que nunca sucedieron.
If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.
It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.
The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.
People that insist upon drinking and driving, are putting the quart before the hearse.
Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways. ... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.