Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

'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.'

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.