Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

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

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

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

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

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

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

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

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.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.