Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

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

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 only defensible war is a war of defense.

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 simplification of anything is always sensational.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

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.

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.