We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
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.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
New roads; new ruts.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
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.
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’
Being ‘contented’ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
A yawn is a silent shout.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
A stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
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.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Half a truth is better than no politics.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
