Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.

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I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.

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There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

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The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

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Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.

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We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

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Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

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Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?

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Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.

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All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

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The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

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I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

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When men cease to believe in God, they will believe in anything

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Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

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As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

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The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong

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The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited, but was defined before it existed.

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...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

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I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

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Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.

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