Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.

Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.

The only object of liberty is life.

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

Man is at his tallest when he bows.

Spring never is spring unless it comes too soon.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

The old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.

Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.

Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.

Do not, I beseech you be troubled by the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistake the hour of the night: it is already morning.

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is to enjoy a good concert. But I do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.

The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.

Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.

History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.

The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.

Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.

In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.

Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.

It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know they are dogmas.

We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.

How much larger your life would be if you were smaller in it.

Posting a letter and getting married [sic] are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

There are two kinds of rebellion. The first is one in which the slave demands something that the tyrant has got. The second is one in which he demands something that the tyrant has not got.

The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.

If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.

Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.

Progress is the mother of problems.

All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.