G. K. Chesterton quotes - page 3

A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man - the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle. (G. K. Chesterton)
When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
G. K. Chesterton
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
G. K. Chesterton
What we call the intellectual world is divided into two types of people - those who worship the intellect and those who use it.
G. K. Chesterton
As a friend of mine once said, very truly, physical cowards are the only men who are not afraid of women.
G. K. Chesterton
Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
G. K. Chesterton
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.
G. K. Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
G. K. Chesterton
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.
G. K. Chesterton
Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue. (G. K. Chesterton)
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
G. K. Chesterton
All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
G. K. Chesterton
These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
G. K. Chesterton
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
G. K. Chesterton
But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.
G. K. Chesterton
When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
G. K. Chesterton
Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!
G. K. Chesterton
The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.
G. K. Chesterton
The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.
G. K. Chesterton
It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms. (G. K. Chesterton)
It is always the secure who are humble.
G. K. Chesterton
Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.
G. K. Chesterton
When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
G. K. Chesterton
It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
G. K. Chesterton