We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.
– G.K. Chesterton
Church
The really great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
– G.K. Chesterton
Men
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
– G.K. Chesterton
Christianity
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
Christmas | Children
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
– G.K. Chesterton
Pride
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
– G.K. Chesterton
Love | Faith | Forgiveness
We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.
– G.K. Chesterton
Church
There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
– G.K. Chesterton
Christianity | Religion | Hatred
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
– G.K. Chesterton
Religion
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
Politics | Apathy | Compromise
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
– G.K. Chesterton
Atheism
Jesus promised the disciples three things – that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy and in constant trouble.
– G.K. Chesterton
Suffering
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy | Crime
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Books
It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.
– G.K. Chesterton
Morality
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
– G.K. Chesterton
Finances | Government
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
– G.K. Chesterton
Pride | Preaching
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
A yawn is a silent shout.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
Gratitude is the mother of all the virtues.
– G.K. Chesterton
Virtue
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
– G.K. Chesterton
Education
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
– G.K. Chesterton
Patience
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
– G.K. Chesterton
Anger | Righteousness
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Happiness | Love | Brokenness
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
– G.K. Chesterton
Teachers
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life | Gratitude
If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.”
– G.K. Chesterton
Atheism
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
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
Contentment
Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life | Youth | Age
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Good and Evil
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
Life
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.
– G.K. Chesterton
Good and Evil | Light
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
– G.K. Chesterton
Inspiration
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
– G.K. Chesterton
Hypocrisy
New roads; new ruts.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
No man who worships education has got the best out of education. Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
– G.K. Chesterton
Education
The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
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
Religion
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Health
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
– G.K. Chesterton
Morality
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
– G.K. Chesterton
Christianity
‘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.’
– G.K. Chesterton
Good and Evil | Patriotism
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
– G.K. Chesterton
Religion | Doubt
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
– G.K. Chesterton
Books
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
Reasoning
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
– G.K. Chesterton
Pride
The mere brute pleasure of reading is the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reading
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
– G.K. Chesterton
History
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
Life | Laughter
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
– G.K. Chesterton
Character
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Theology | Reasoning | The Heart
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
– G.K. Chesterton
Education
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
– G.K. Chesterton
Music
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Apathy | Growth
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Laziness
Tolerance is the virtue of men who don’t believe in anything.
– G.K. Chesterton
Tolerance
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor.
– G.K. Chesterton
Friendship | Enemies
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
– G.K. Chesterton
Adversity | Quarreling
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning | Miracles
…but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.
– G.K. Chesterton
Religion
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
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
Charity
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
– G.K. Chesterton
Education
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
– G.K. Chesterton
Love
There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
– G.K. Chesterton
Health
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Books | Reading
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
Contentment
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
– G.K. Chesterton
Books
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
Family | Freedom
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
– G.K. Chesterton
Politics
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
– G.K. Chesterton
Truth | History
Half a truth is better than no politics.
– G.K. Chesterton
Truth | Politics
Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning | America
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
– G.K. Chesterton
Worship
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
– G.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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
– G.K. Chesterton
Tolerance | Ignorance
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
– G.K. Chesterton
Morality
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die.
– G.K. Chesterton
Courage
Hell is God’s great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.
– G.K. Chesterton
Hell
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.
– G.K. Chesterton
Life
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
– G.K. Chesterton
Marriage | War
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
– G.K. Chesterton
Reasoning | Greed | The Heart