Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English essayist, novelist, journalist, and critic. He devoted his extraordinary intellect and creative power to the reform of the English government and society.
Chesterton was born in London. His career began when he verbalized his first story to his aunt Rose at the age of three. He experimented in the occult as a young man, returned to the Church of England, and converted to Catholicism later in life. His thoughts on religion influenced much of his writing.
Chesterton was also amazingly prolific—he wrote fast and barely edited what he wrote. He considered himself largely a journalist, and he wrote 4,000 newspaper essays; he also wrote some 80 books (covering fiction, criticism, literary biography, and theology) as well as several hundred poems, 200 short stories, and many plays. He made his points with wit and paradox, his vast body of work contains a plethora of quotable material.
Chesterton is best known for his stories about Father Brown, a crime-solving Roman Catholic priest who seems awkward and inept—he regularly misplaces his umbrella, falls asleep during police interrogations—but knows more about crime than the criminals. Chesterton got the idea from observing Catholic priests, who listen to confessions all day long but know more about degradation and corruption than do anyone else in society.
Chesterton novels include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904,) a political satire that many readers consider his most entertaining work. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908,) widely considered his best fictional work, is presented as a detective story but its surrealistic turns and unworldly characters turn it into a metaphysical thriller of Christian allegory.
Chesterton’s two greatest Christian apologetics were Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925;) the latter contributed to the British intellectual C. S. Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by G. K. Chesterton
There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Curiosity
I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Conflict, Just for Fun
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Compromise
What we call personality (…) has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd. … Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an ‘ism’ quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Selfishness
A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that a fine is generally much lighter.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Taxes
How much larger your life would be if your self could be smaller in it.
—G. K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Boredom
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Birds
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Music
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 one means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
—G. K. Chesterton
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
—G. K. Chesterton
A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Money
We are always giving foreign names to very native things. If there is a thing that reeks of the glorious tradition of the old English tavern, it is toasted cheese. But for some wild reason we call it Welsh rarebit. I believe that what we call Irish stew might more properly be called English stew, and that it is not particularly familiar in Ireland.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Food
It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.
—G. K. Chesterton
Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Aspirations, Goals
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
—G. K. Chesterton
The center of every man’s existence is a dream.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Dreams
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Emotions
The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it—because it is a fact.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Fear
Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest….Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Language
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Blessings, Appreciation, Gratitude, Happiness, Contentment
The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had existed; it was defined before it existed.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: America, Belief, Faith
We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Proverbs, Common Sense, Welfare, Common Sense
Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Now, Virtue, Love, Equality
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Men
I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: America
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Buddhism, Religion, One liners
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Family
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