"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly"
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"...there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds"
-The Everlasting Man (1925)
"The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."
-Illustrated London News, July 16, 1910
"...if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
-What's Wrong With the World (1910)
"...I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean."
-Illustrated London News, March 10, 1906
"It is a very good thing...to be frequently married again- always, of course, to the same person."
-Illustrated London News, October 9, 1909,
"The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder"
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost"
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
-Alarms and Discursions (1910)
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."
-What's Wrong With the World (1910)
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
-The Defendant (1901)
"[Puritanism] is having righteous indignation about the wrong things."
-Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)
"...coincidences...are a spiritual sort of puns"
-Irish Impressions (1919)
"The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
-Chesterton as Seen by His Contemporaries (quoted in)
"You should not look a gift universe in the mouth"
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maise Ward [quoted in]
"A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back."
-Illustrated London News, January 14, 1911
"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
-The Everlasting Man (1925)
"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicans are hanged."
-Interview in The Cleveland Press, March 1, 1921
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"...I would rather be hated for some...real reason than pursued with love on account of all kinds of qualities which I do not possess..."
-The Appetite of Tyranny (1915)
"For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green"
-"The Rolling English Road" (1914)
-"I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument"
-Magic (1913)
"...he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving"
-St. Francis of Assisi (1923)
"Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance."
-The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (book essays collected in 1975)
"I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess."
-The Victorian Age in Literature (1913 )
"Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"When men really understand that they are brothers they instantly begin to fight"
-Utopia of Userers (1917)
"...when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"...we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves."
-The Defendant (1901)
"A lot of men....could go on saying for days that something ought to be done...But if you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it."
-The Secret of Father Brown (1927)
"For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King."
-Charles Dickens (1906)
"I gravely doubt whether women were ever married by capture. I think they pretended to be; as they do still."
-What's Wrong With the World (1910)
"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."
-The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
" 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' "
-The Defendant (1901)
"...If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
-The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
"For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad."
-The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)
"There is nothing that fails like success."
-Heretics (1905)
"For there is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell"
-Charles Dickens (1906)
"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star"
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."
-All Things Considered (1908)
"But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget."
-"The Secret People" (1907)
"America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed."
-What I Saw in America (1922)
"Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the faiulres of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?"
-The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."
-The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)
"For it is only on those in the struggle for existence who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn."
-The Speaker, February 2, 1901
"The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,' over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of today have written it over the gates of this world."
-Charles Dickens (1906)
"Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural"
-Heretics (1905)
"...there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them."
-Alarms and Discusions (1910)
"...even if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead."
-All Things Considered (1908)
-"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong..."
-The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) [opening line]
"It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made."
-Alarms and Discurions (1910)
"A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, 'A new commandment I give to you, "be hard,"' he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, `be dead.'" Sensibility is the definition of life.
-Heretics (1905)
"Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked...It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal; and that you are a paralytic."
-Avowals and Denials (1935)
"Slang is too sacred and precious to be used promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it expresses what the King's English could not"
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward [quoted in]
"There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle."
-Heretics (1905)
"Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry."
-The Defendant (1901)
"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man"
-G.K.C. as M.C. (1929)
"He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons."
-Heretics (1905)
"But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit. Not a few dishonest people felt it."
-A Handful of Authors (1953)
"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do -- because they are Christian ."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale."
-Heretics (1905)
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure"
-Twelve Types (1902)
"We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous."
-The Defendant (1901)
"Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learn to spread our thoughts thinner?"
-Twelve Types (1902)
"The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, 'Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do.'"
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"Being educated means reading the newspapers. Being properly educated means not believing newspapers after you have read them."
-Boston Globe (quoted in)
-"Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
-Illustrated London News, December 2, 1905
"Silence is the unbearable repartee"
-Charles Dickens (1906)
"A yawn may be defined as a silent yell"
-George Bernard Shaw (1909)
"Experts in poverty (by which I do not mean sociologists, but poor men)..."
-Illustrated London News, March 25, 1911
"The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it."
-All Things Considered (1908)
"...I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"Men, they say, are now imitating angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect that I have heard of."
-Alarms and Discursions (1910)
"Common sense, that extinct branch of pyschology..."
-Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)
"If the characters are not wicked, the book is."
-All Things Considered (1908)
"To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence."
-A Miscellany of Men (1912)
"For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word"
-"The Aristocrat" (1912)
-"...knowing nine hundred words is not always more important than knowing what some of them mean"
-Irish Impressions (1919)
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but the absence of self-criticism"
-Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)
"And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"...the chief idea of my life...is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted."
-Autobiography (1936)
"It takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes."
-The Thing (1929)
"It is very much like being in hell- pleasantly, of course."
-Chesterton commenting on New York in an interview with the Montreal Daily Star
-"What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read!"
-What I Saw in America (1922)
[Chesterton's impression on first seeing the lights of Broadway]
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"But when we are seeking for the real merits of a man it is unwise to go to his enemies, and much more foolish to go to himself."
-Heretics (1905)
"..of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)
"We hear much about new religions; many of them based on the very latest novelties of Buddha and Pythagoras."
-The Thing (1929)
"Cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing; but cruelty to a man is not cruelty, it is treason. Tyranny over a man is not tyranny, it is rebellion, for man is royal."
-Charles Dickens (1906)
"We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable"
-William Blake (1910)
"The Church had learnt, not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral of God is always a premature burial."
-The Crimes of England (1916)
"Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king's orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed."
-Orthodoxy (1908)
"He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments."
-Manalive (1912)
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it"
-A Short History of England (1917)
"It is always the secure who are humble"
-The Defendant (1901)
"When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song"
-The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
"The nation that has no gods at all not only dies, but what is more, is bored to death."
-Illustrated London News, January 9, 1909
"There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier."
-The Outline of Sanity (1926)
"...the secret of life lies in laughter and humility"
Heretics (1905)
"It is idle to talk against representative government or for it. All government is representative government until it begins to decay. Unfortunately (as is also evident) all government begins to decay the instant it begins to govern."
-A Miscellany of Men (1912)
"...[Free verse]... is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture."
-Fancies versus Fads (1923)
"It is often a strategic mistake to silence a man, because it leaves the world under the impression that he had something to say"
-Illustrated London News, August 14, 1915
-"Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline"
Manalive (1912)
"The religion of Christ, like many true things, has been disproved an extraordinary number of times."
-Twelve Types (1902)
"Philanthropy, as far as I can see, is rapidly becoming the recognisable mark of a wicked man."
-Illustrated London News, May 29, 1909
"A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter"
-Illustrated London News, May 23, 1931
"Politicians now think they have to educate the electorate and explain to them what is good for them. Gone are the days when the electorate educated their representatives...with the certainty that if no result were forthcoming...neither would any further votes be forthcoming."
-G.K.'s Weekly, March 30, 1933
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the god"
-Christendom in Dublin (1932)
"The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born."
-Heretics (1905)
"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey towards the stars?"
-Return to Chesterton by Maisie Ward [quoted in]
"Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities."
-What's Wrong With the World (1910)
"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."
-Autobiography (1936)
-"Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment of private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kengsington..."
-Autobiography (1936) [opening line]
