Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

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

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

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