Quotes By Gilbert K. Chesterton

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.