G.k. Chesterton Quotes

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

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

~ G.k. Chesterton

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.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

~ G.k. Chesterton

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, Do it again; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, Do it again to the sun; and every evening, Do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

~ G.k. Chesterton

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

~ G.k. Chesterton

He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

~ G.k. Chesterton

...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.

~ G.k. Chesterton

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those opposite to the fact, it is actually our truisms that are untrue.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

~ G.k. Chesterton

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

~ G.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.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?

~ G.k. Chesterton

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth 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; God has kept that good wine until not. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The 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.

~ G.k. Chesterton

A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree and a swing.Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangsOn all my sins and me,Because He does not take awayThe terror from the treeAnd stones still shine along the roadThat are and cannot be.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for wine,But I shall not grow too old to seeUnearthly daylight shine,Changing my chamber’s dust to snowTill I doubt if it be mine.Behold, the crowning mercies melt,The first surprises stay;And in my dross is dropped a giftFor which I dare not pray:That a man grow used to grief and joyBut not to night and day.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for lies;But I shall not grow too old to seeEnormous night arise,A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.Nor am I worthy to unlooseThe latchet of my shoe;Or shake the dust from off my feetOr the staff that bears me throughOn ground that is too good to last,Too solid to be true.Men grow too old to woo, my love,Men grow too old to wed;But I shall not grow too old to seeHung crazily overheadIncredible rafters when I wakeAnd I find that I am not dead.A thrill of thunder in my hair:Though blackening clouds be plain,Still I am stung and startledBy the first drop of the rain:Romance and pride and passion passAnd these are what remain.Strange crawling carpets of the grass,Wide windows of the sky;So in this perilous grace of GodWith all my sins go I:And things grow new though I grow old,Though I grow old and die.

~ G.k. Chesterton

This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death.

~ G.k. Chesterton