Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.

My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.

If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.

of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.

Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.

If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

There is no bigot like the atheist.

The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.

Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.

To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.

[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.

War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.

It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.

With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.

Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.

It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

[Capitalism is] that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.