Top 1337 Quotes & Sayings by Gilbert K. Chesterton - Page 5

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

The test of happiness is gratitude.

A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is.

At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.

The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.

The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.

We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

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

Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.

The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.

The Mass is not only about God becoming man, it is about Man becoming more himself.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.

Faith means believing the unbelievable.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.

A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.

Passion makes every detail important.

The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution.

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".

I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee.

The more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.

In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.

Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

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

The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.

Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.

Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.

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.