Gilbert k. chesterton quotes

Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

The test of happiness is gratitude.

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

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

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

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

Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.

humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle

Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

God is not a symbol of goodness; goodness is a symbol of God

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

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.

The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.

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

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

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.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

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

One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

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

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.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

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

It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.

The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

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

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

Faith means believing the unbelievable.

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 traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.

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.

A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

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

Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.

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

The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

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.

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.

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.

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

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

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

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

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Never forget that the devil fell by force of gravity. He who has the faith has the fun.

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

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

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

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

Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.

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

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.

Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.

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.

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

When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven's name to what?

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

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

We're all in the same boat, and we're all seasick.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

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.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

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.

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.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry, Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die; The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide, Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.

Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.

Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses

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

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

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

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

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.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun.; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic monotony that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The modern habit of saying "This is my opinion, but I may be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" – the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

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.

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

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

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

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.

We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed

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

Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.

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

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

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

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

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

It is always the secure who are humble.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities - and found no statues of Committees.

Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.

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

Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

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

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

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.