Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

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.

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.

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.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

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.