Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

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Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

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A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

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A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

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The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.

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But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

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Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

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Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

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Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

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The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.

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Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

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There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

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

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To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

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The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.

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We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

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Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

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I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.

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The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.

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Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

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