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
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
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Hair, Riches, Vanity, Age, Wealth
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Religion
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Prayer, Children, Humankind, Action, Self-reliance
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Terrorism, Business, Cheating
Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Justice, Mercy
There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Curiosity
I would sooner call myself a journalist than an author for a journalist is a journeyman.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Journalism
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Teachers, Teaching, Education
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Difficulties, Helpfulness, Adversity
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Language
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Contentment
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Arguments
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Book, Books
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Experience
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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Tradition, Miscellaneous
Progress is the mother of problems.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Progress
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Music
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Identifying Problems, Perspective, Problems, Problem-solving
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
It is always the secure who are humble.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Humility
How much larger your life would be if your self could be smaller in it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them. They have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne. Americans do not need to drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Alcohol, America
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?
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Gratitude
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Education
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Humanity
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would simply be running with the blood of philanthropists.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Charity
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Blessings, Gratitude
A new morality has burst upon us with some violence in connection with the problem of strong drink; and enthusiasts in the matter range from the man who is violently thrown out at 12.30, to the lady who smashes American bars with an axe. In these discussions it is almost always felt that one very wise and moderate position is to say that wine or such stuff should only be drunk as a medicine. With this I should venture to disagree with a peculiar ferocity. The one genuinely dangerous and immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as a medicine. And for this reason: If a man drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is trying to obtain something exceptional; something he does not expect every hour of the day; something which, unless he is a little insane, he will not try to get every hour of the day. But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain health, he is trying to get something natural; something, that is, that he ought not to be without; something that he may find it difficult to reconcile himself to being without. The man may not be seduced who has seen the ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordinary.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Drinking
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Necessity, Literature, Authors & Writing, Luxury
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
To be simple is the best thing in the world.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Simplicity
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Committees, Promises
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Reason
If there was not God, there would be no atheists.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: God
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Emotions
The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something—war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Fight, Fighting
The center of every man’s existence is a dream.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Dreams
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