Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

A yawn is a silent shout.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

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

Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

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.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.