Top 1337 Quotes & Sayings by Gilbert K. Chesterton - Page 3

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

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.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

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.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

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.

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

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

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.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of 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.

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.

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.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

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

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

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.

Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

You'll never find the solution if you don't see the problem.

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.

I may not practice what I preach but God forbid I should preach what I practice

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.