Authors — Quotes

G.K. Chesterton Quotes: 53

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Alarms and Discursions
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
What's Wrong with the World
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Heretics
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.
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.
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.
Orthodoxy
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
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.
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.
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.
Orthodoxy
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.
What I Saw in America
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.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
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.
Orthodoxy
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.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
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.
A Chesterton calendar
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
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.
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.
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
..."vers libre,"(free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
Fancies Versus Fads
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
The Thing
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.
Orthodoxy
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.
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
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.
The Everlasting Man
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.
Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
Heretics
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
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.
Orthodoxy
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.
The Innocence of Father Brown