Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

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You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

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How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

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Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.

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It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.

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To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

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I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

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Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.

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No man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.

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We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

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

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It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.

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I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations.

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If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

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I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

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The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

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London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

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I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.

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Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

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A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.

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