Authors - G. K. Chesterton
Brief Biography
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 - 14 June 1936) was an English writer. He published works on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox". Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories - first carefully turning them inside out." For example, Chesterton wrote "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it." - Wikipedia
Quotes by G. K. ChestertonBrowse all of these
Quote 497by Anonymous on 05/01/2011
The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
Quote 1062by Anonymous on 10/01/2011
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
Quote 1241by Anonymous on 11/01/2011
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
Quote 1369by Anonymous on 12/01/2011
Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.
Quote 1391by Anonymous on 12/01/2011
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
Quote 1442by Anonymous on 13/01/2011
Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?
Quote 1560by Anonymous on 14/01/2011
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Quote 1578by Anonymous on 14/01/2011
Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.
Quote 1590by Anonymous on 14/01/2011
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
Quote 1638by Anonymous on 14/01/2011
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
Quote 1744by Anonymous on 16/01/2011
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
Quote 1990by Anonymous on 20/01/2011
These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
Quote 2002by Anonymous on 21/01/2011
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything.
Quote 2031by Anonymous on 21/01/2011
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
Quote 2069by Anonymous on 21/01/2011
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Quote 2112by Anonymous on 22/01/2011
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Quote 2119by Anonymous on 22/01/2011
All 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.
Quote 2285by Anonymous on 27/01/2011
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
Quote 2312by Anonymous on 27/01/2011
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
Quote 2381by Anonymous on 28/01/2011
Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.
Quote 2441by Anonymous on 29/01/2011
There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
Quote 2482by Anonymous on 30/01/2011
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
Quote 2580by Anonymous on 02/02/2011
It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
Quote 2587by Anonymous on 02/02/2011
The only right way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning--at the beginning of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way for the sake of brevity.
Quote 2600by Anonymous on 02/02/2011
Theology is only thought applied to religion.
Quote 2768by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
Quote 2877by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
Quote 2956by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
Quote 2976by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Quote 3070by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all.
Quote 3075by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.
Quote 3101by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Quote 3107by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.
Quote 3111by Anonymous on 03/02/2011
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
Quote 3155by Anonymous on 05/02/2011
If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have someone to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet in mine?
Quote 3336by Anonymous on 05/02/2011
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Quote 3338by Anonymous on 05/02/2011
Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
Quote 3597by Anonymous on 07/02/2011
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
Quote 3684by Anonymous on 09/02/2011
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 3770by Anonymous on 10/02/2011
It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed. For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more than a Nihilist must sympathize with one version of nature or the other.
Quote 3974by Anonymous on 12/02/2011
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.
Quote 3976by Anonymous on 12/02/2011
When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Quote 4027by Anonymous on 12/02/2011
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
Quote 4044by Anonymous on 12/02/2011
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.
Quote 4056by Anonymous on 13/02/2011
Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.
Quote 4081by Anonymous on 14/02/2011
Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.
Quote 4186by Anonymous on 16/02/2011
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Quote 4284by Anonymous on 18/02/2011
When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
Quote 4362by Anonymous on 20/02/2011
It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.
Quote 4374by Anonymous on 20/02/2011
'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.'
Quote 4379by Anonymous on 20/02/2011
At least five times...with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.
Quote 4574by Anonymous on 23/02/2011
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 4612by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
Quote 4613by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
Quote 4646by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
America is the only country ever founded on a creed.
Quote 4691by Anonymous on 25/02/2011
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
Quote 4736by Anonymous on 27/02/2011
Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?
Quote 4785by Anonymous on 27/02/2011
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
Quote 4786by Anonymous on 27/02/2011
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
Quote 4854by Anonymous on 01/03/2011
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.
Quote 5480by Anonymous on 06/07/2011
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.
Quote 5569by Anonymous on 19/07/2011
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Quote 6506by Anonymous on 20/09/2011
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
Quote 10781by Anonymous on 28/10/2012
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Quote 10996by Anonymous on 14/11/2012
The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen.
Quote 11152by Anonymous on 27/11/2012
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Quote 13273by Anonymous on 04/07/2013
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Quote 13934by Anonymous on 21/09/2013
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
