G. K. Chesterton

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”

“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”

“The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

“He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.”

“There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”

“Bosh," he said, "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.”

“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.”

“Men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.”

“Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.”

“Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”

“When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.”

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

“When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.”

“A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

“We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.”

“Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

“But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.”

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.”

“Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.”

“As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.”

“The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.”

“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”

“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.”

“I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

“When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”

“Prince, Bayard would have smashed his swordWill someone take me to a pub?”

“A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.”

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

“There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.”

“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.”

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”

“The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.”

“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

“There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.”

“The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.”

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.”

“Plato was right, but not quite right.”

“Half the trouble about the modern man is that he is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.”

“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.”

“Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.”

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

“A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.”

“I've searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.”

“The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.”

“And I will add this point of merely personal experience of humanity: when men have a real explanation they explain it, eagerly and copiously and in common speech, as Huxley freely gave it when he thought he had it. When they have no explanation to offer, they give short dignified replies, disdainful of the ignorance of the multitude.”

“It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.”

“A stiff apology is a second insult.”

“The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.”

“In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.”

“Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes.”

“We all know that the 'divine glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility — in other people.”

“It is always the secure who are humble.”

“A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.”

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”

“The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.”

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

“There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end”

“The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect.”

“When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.”

“The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.”

“'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'.”

“All revolutions are doctrinal — such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity.”

“Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

“Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise—too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience.”

“Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!”

“Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.”

“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.”

“America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.”

“A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.”

“When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.”

“A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.”

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”

“For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.”

“It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.”

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

“Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it; And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.”

“For we that fight till the world is free, And fought each other, the world and we.”

“It is all as of old, the empty clangour, We know each other, these slaves and we.”

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”

“If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.”

“One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling.”

“His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.”

“Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.”

“Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?”

“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.”

“One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.”

“Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue.”

“The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

“To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

“...If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist.”

“I know that journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

“If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.”

“For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.”

“She hasn’t got any intellect to speak of; but you don’t need any intellect to be an intellectual.”

“It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”

“I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument.”

“It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.”

“The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.”

“A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.”

“The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.”

“Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.”

“He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news.”

“It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.”

“He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.”

“In the city set upon slime and loam,For God has pity on this great land.”

“Men that are men again: Who goes home?Who goes home?”

“It is something to have wept as we have wept, Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.”

“To have seen you and your unforgotten face, It is something to be older than the sky.”

“In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts, And the lightning. It is something to have been.”

“A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. … The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.”

“Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes—that they have done for some time past—they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. … I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.”

“The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.”

“Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.”

“The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.”

“In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it—or he would be obviously below it.”

“Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.”

“Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with "they say" or "don't you know that?" or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.”

“Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis — that is, enforce confession without absolution.”

“About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity.”

“We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.”

“An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.”

“He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.”

“All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.”

“'I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humour, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.' 'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown. 'Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I'm not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones.”

“Yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.”