QUOTES by Gilbert K Chesterton
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“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness – or so good as drink.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“I 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.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.” –
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“To hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.”
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton