Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
-- G. K. Chesterton
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. ...The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism
-- G. 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.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Man can hardly be defined ... as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.
-- G. K. Chesterton
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
-- G. K. Chesterton
It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters,
-- G. K. Chesterton
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
-- G. K. Chesterton
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
-- G. K. Chesterton
All government is an ugly necessity.
-- G. K. Chesterton
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
-- G. K. Chesterton
There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
-- G. 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.
-- G. K. Chesterton
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
-- G. K. Chesterton
It is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Art is the signature of man.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.
-- G. K. Chesterton
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
-- G. K. Chesterton
What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.
-- G. 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.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
-- G. 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.
-- G. K. Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
-- G. K. Chesterton
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Many 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?
-- G. K. Chesterton
My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word 'kleptomania' is a vulgar example of what I mean.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.
-- G. K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
-- G. K. Chesterton
There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance...thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste...if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than than Shakespeare.
-- G. K. Chesterton
To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
-- G. K. Chesterton
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
-- G. K. Chesterton
It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.
-- G. K. Chesterton
I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals...
-- G. K. Chesterton
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Progress is the mother of all problems.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
-- G. K. Chesterton
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