Famous Quotes

Quotes by Gilbert K Chesterton

• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
• A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
• A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
• A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
• All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
• 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.
• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
• Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
• Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
• Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
• Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
• Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
• Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
• Half a truth is better than no politics.
• Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
• I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
• I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
• I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
• I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
• I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
• If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
• In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
• It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
• It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
• Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
• Love means to love that which is unlovable or it is no virtue at all.
• Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
• 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.
• Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
• Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
• Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.