Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.

To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.

Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.

The philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

We are all ordinary people. And it's the extraordinary people Who know it.

One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.

English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.

The reason that angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly.

Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.

If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple.

Christian Science … is the direct denial both of science and of Christianity, for Science rests wholly on the recognition of truth and Christianity on the recognition of pain.

It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.

The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.

Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.