Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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.

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

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.

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.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

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.

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

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

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.

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.

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.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

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

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

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