Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

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

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

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

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.

A yawn is a silent shout.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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