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G. K. Chesterton quotes courtesy of brainyquote.com
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A yawn is a silent shout.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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. [On his college registration experience]
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
'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.'
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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