Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

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The reason that angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly.

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The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

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No man can be merry unless he is serious.

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Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

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The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

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The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

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Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

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Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

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Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

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The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.

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Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.

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The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

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Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

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In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

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People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

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The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

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In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

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To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world.

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A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

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