Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.

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That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

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Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

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There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

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There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.

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Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

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We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

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London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

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The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

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I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

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The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

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Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

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I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

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A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

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He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

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Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

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I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.

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Every great literature has always been allegorical - allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

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I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right

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