G.k. Chesterton Quotes

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Free verse is like free love, it is a contradiction in terms.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

~ G.k. Chesterton

An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.''So it is,' said Mr. Syme.'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.

~ G.k. Chesterton

You say you are a poet of law, I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden

~ G.k. Chesterton

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

~ G.k. Chesterton

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

~ 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

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

~ G.k. Chesterton

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Religious 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.

~ G.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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

~ G.k. Chesterton

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I will not hit you if you do not hit me; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each other in the holy place.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Saint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one's own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint's name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

~ G.k. Chesterton

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

~ G.k. Chesterton

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.

~ G.k. Chesterton

But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.

~ G.k. Chesterton

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

~ G.k. Chesterton

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.

~ G.k. Chesterton

While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.

~ G.k. Chesterton