A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
A yawn is a silent shout.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf ;is better than a whole loaf.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Half a truth is better than no politics.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton Quote
