Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton