Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Men Quotes , Broken Quotes

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Believe Quotes , Artist Quotes

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Educational Quotes , People Quotes

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Men Quotes , Doubt Quotes

Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Liars Quotes , Men Quotes

When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Deities Quotes , Looks Quotes

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Men Quotes , Holy Places Quotes

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Funny Quotes , Men Quotes

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Men Quotes , Hair Quotes

When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Firsts Quotes , Found Quotes

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Baby Quotes , Birth Rate Quotes

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Black And White Quotes , Two Quotes

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Baby Quotes , Children Quotes

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Morality Quotes , Modern Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Believe Quotes , Practice Quotes

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Pain Quotes , Mistake Quotes

There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Humble Quotes , Fighting Quotes

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Silence Quotes , Modern Quotes

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , America Quotes , Independence Quotes

Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Saint Quotes