Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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

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I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

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Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.

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It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.

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There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

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The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

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The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

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But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

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We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

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Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

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Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

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Here ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?

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Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.

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When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

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There are no new ideas about female education.

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The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

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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.

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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

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For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

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