Gilbert K. Chesterton
- Country : United Kingdom
- Profession :Writer
- DOB: 1874-05-29
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936) was a prolific English writer, philosopher, and critic known for his wit and literary contributions. He penned numerous essays, novels, and works of non-fiction, earning acclaim for his distinctive style and keen insights. Chesterton’s most famous fictional character, Father Brown, featured in his detective stories, showcased his ability to blend mystery with moral and philosophical themes. As a staunch Catholic convert, his writing often explored themes of faith and social justice. Chesterton’s works include “The Man Who Was Thursday,” “Orthodoxy,” and “Heretics.” His profound influence on literature and thought continues to be celebrated today.
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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMisers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhat embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMen 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonGluttony is a great fault; but we do not necessarily dislike a glutton. We only dislike the glutton when he becomes a gourmet-that is, we only dislike him when he not only wants the best for himself, but knows what is best for other people.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWe are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological, and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilization. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralyzed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhat affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonNeither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHe is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHe is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMadness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThat is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonModerate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHell is God’s great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere are many ways to fall down, but there’s only one way to stand up straight.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonOnly friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHow much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonOver-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonLord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMen always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonIt [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonOne of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonCertain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonLet a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHow you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonAs long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonIf men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMoral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWe men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonReligious 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMany clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWe do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonIt is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonPoetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonNever tear down a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right: It is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonJust going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonAnd when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThose thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHere ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThis is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonTrue contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhat people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhen we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonYouth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonAnd it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonFor children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe prime truth of woman, the universal mother…that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonParadox has been defined as Truth standing on her head to get attention.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonEvery true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonAll science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonTruth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWomen are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonRight is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonPeople who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonScience in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonIt isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe world will never starve for want of wonders but only for the want of wonder.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere is nothing wrong with electricity; nothing except that modern man is not a god who holds the thunderbolts but a savage who is struck by lightning.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonTo mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWe talk about life as being dull as ditchwater, but is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonYou can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton“Divine discontent” We have come to the wrong star…That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonReal development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonYou say grace before meals. 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonOrdinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonJournalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonEducation is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonRitual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHonor is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall porters.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonAn adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonEvery act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWe make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonTruth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonMen do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonExperience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhen 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?
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonJournalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonPride juggles with her toppling towers, They strike the sun and cease, But the firm feet of humility They grip the ground like trees.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWe ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonArt consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonTradition 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhite… 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonDo not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonCourage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonHappiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThose thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonNothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe 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.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonChristianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonI agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonI believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonJesus promised his disciples three things – that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonImpartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonI owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonI am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonI would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonEducation is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThere are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonOne sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonTo love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonWhenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonA society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonIt is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonFairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
Author: Gilbert K. ChestertonThe true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton