“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
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― 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
“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
― 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
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― 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
“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 Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
― 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
“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
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
― 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
“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
― 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
“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
― G. K. Chesterton
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
― 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
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Dear Sir: Regarding your article ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ I am. Yours truly,”
― G.K. Chesterton
“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G. K. Chesterton
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
― 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
“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”
― 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
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
― G. K. Chesterton
“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.”
― G. K. Chesterton
“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”
― 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
“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
“Reason is itself 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, Orthodoxy
“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
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
― G.K. Chesterton