Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Education
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Atheism, God
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Perfection, Doing
Americans are a backward people, with all the very real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: America
White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Money
I would not say that old men grow wise, for men never grow wise; and many old men retain a very attractive childishness and cheerful innocence. Elderly people are often much more romantic than younger people, and sometimes even more adventurous, having begun to realize how many things they do not know.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Aging
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Eating, Just for Fun
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Writing
The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Evil
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Literature, Reading, Writing, Heroes, Books, Heroism, Beauty
In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.
—G. K. Chesterton
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
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: One liners, Religion, Buddhism
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, I do not care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Wine
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Intuition
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Architecture
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
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Hate, Time
There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Memory
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Science
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Argument, One liners, Arguments
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Understanding
There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Curiosity
No man knows he is young while he is young.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Youth, Time
Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Aspirations, Goals
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Art, Personality
New roads; new ruts.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Progress, Promises
A yawn is a silent shout.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Bores, Boredom
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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Malcolm Muggeridge English Journalist
- Edwin Arnold English Poet
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- Coventry Patmore English Writer
- John Dryden English Poet
- John Milton English Poet
- Francis Thompson English Poet
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Aldous Huxley English Humanist
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