Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

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Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

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The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.

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The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

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What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

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A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.

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I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.

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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

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There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

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The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

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The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.

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All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

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Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant

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Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

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Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

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Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

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A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy.

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