G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all

Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it..

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

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

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

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.. G.K. Chesterton

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

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

Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.

Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism - self-denial.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

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 place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

You say you are a poet of law; I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden

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

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention 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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.

It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

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

I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

it will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

The chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

Who would condescend to strike down the mere things he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prize-fighter? Who would stoop to be fearless - like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear.

One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.

Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.

It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?

The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.

The dreadful joy Thy Son has sent
Is heavier than any care;
We find, as Cain his punishment,
Our pardon more than we can bear.

And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find - the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child.

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

In the modern world, we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not gotten tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as green banners.

We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.

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

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War - they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

I am sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient and honourable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realised how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.

This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

There was something of relative freedom in that feudal gesture of the vow; for no man asks vows from slaves anymore than from spades.

...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides.

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

Without the family, we are helpless before the State.

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

The huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

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

There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset..

There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

I have a suspicion that you are all mad,’ said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; ‘but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

Fairy tales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.

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

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.

A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.

Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.

But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.

You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"
Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
"No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.

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