Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.

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The strangest whim has seized me ... After all I think I will not hang myself today.

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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.

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Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

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Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.

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A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.

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Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

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If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

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The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.

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What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

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Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

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A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.

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But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

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Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

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There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

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We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.

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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

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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 grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

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Americans have a taste for…rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased.

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If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.

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