Gilbert K. Chesterton's Quotes

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

A yawn is a silent shout.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

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.

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.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

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.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

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.

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.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

New roads; new ruts.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

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.

'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.'

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.

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.