Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

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.

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

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

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

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

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

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.

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.

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.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

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.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.