G.K. Chesterton Quotes

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

— G.K. Chesterton

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front
”

— G.K. Chesterton

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

— G.K. Chesterton

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types
the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

— G.K. Chesterton

“I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“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.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“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.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But ... if you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

— G.K. Chesterton

He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable that it might well have been a dream.

— G.K. Chesterton

“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.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“As we have taken the circle as a symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as a symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its head a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because is has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“The Skeleton
Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No: I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
It was hid so carefully.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908”

— G.K. Chesterton

My best friends are all either bottomless skeptics or quite uncontrollable believers ...

— G.K. Chesterton

“Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left - sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Our age is obviously the Nonsense Age; the wiser sort of nonsense being provided for the children and the sillier sort of nonsense for the grown-up people.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

— G.K. Chesterton

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

— G.K. Chesterton

“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.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.”

— G.K. Chesterton

The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.

— G.K. Chesterton

“It was like the face of some ancient archangel, judging justly after heroic wars. There was laughter in the eyes, and in the mouth honour and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the same great, grey-clad shoulders that I had seen from behind. But when I saw him from behind I was certain he was an animal, and when I saw him in front I knew he was a god.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated.

— G.K. Chesterton

“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.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Is it possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening "Do it again" to the moon." from Orthodoxy.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.”

— G.K. Chesterton

They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment.

— G.K. Chesterton

“Wish to deal with my most distinguished contemporaries, not personally or in a merely literary manner, but in relation to the real body of doctrine which they teach. I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man?”

— G.K. Chesterton

“When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloud-band left and right; unbarring great clear furnaces of rolling gold.”

— G.K. Chesterton

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced.

— G.K. Chesterton

“We are forced to fight a duel. We are forced by honour and an internal intellectual need. Do not, for your own sake, attempt to stop us. I know all the excellent and ethical things that you will want to say to us. I know all about the essential requirements of civil order: I have written leading articles about them all my life. I know all about the sacredness of human life; I have bored all my friends with it. Try and understand our position. This man and I are alone in the modern world in that we think that God is essentially important. I think He does not exist; that is where the importance comes in for me. But this man thinks that He does exist, and thinking that very properly thinks Him more important than anything else. Now we wish to make a great demonstration and assertion-something that will set the world on fire like the first Christian persecutions. If”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided.”

— G.K. Chesterton

I really have no experience," he began. "No one has any experience," said the other, "of the Battle of Armageddon." "But I am really unfit-" "You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown. "Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test." "I do," said the other-"martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.

— G.K. Chesterton

“Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally”

— G.K. Chesterton

“The ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry”

— G.K. Chesterton

We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.

— G.K. Chesterton