G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton quotes. Run by @PatrickFoos. @ me for sources or if scheduled quotes end.

We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

It is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

As every normal man desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom;

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

The temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

A poor man and his wife are a business partnership

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick and the dead.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

The Socialist says that property is already concentrated into Trusts and Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further in the State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and return; the only step forward is the step backward.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

The worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

It is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

We find that while there is a perfectly genuine danger of fanaticism from the men who have unworldly ideals, the permanent and urgent danger of fanaticism is from the men who have worldly ideals.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

Peasants tilling patches of their own land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

All the colours mixed together in purity ought to make a perfect white. Mixed together on any human paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a thing very like many new religions.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCQuote]

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork.