Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on born May 29, 1874, London, England. Chesterton attended St. Paul’s School and later studied art at the University College in London.
Chesterton was a social and literary critic. He remains best known for his series about the priest-detective Father Brown.
The author of numerous essays, novels and short stories, Chesterton passed away on June 14, 1936.
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
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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
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
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
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
‘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
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
New roads; new ruts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Half a truth is better than no politics.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A yawn is a silent shout.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
