Words matter. These are the best Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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.
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
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.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
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.
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.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
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.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
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.
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
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.
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?
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
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.
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.
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
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.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
‘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.’
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
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.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
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.
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.
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
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.
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
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.
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
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.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
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.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
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