Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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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I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

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The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.

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The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

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When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

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...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

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The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.

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The supreme adventure is being BORN

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Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.

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Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.

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Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

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Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

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The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

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The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

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People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

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Silence is the unbearable repartee.

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Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

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The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

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A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

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