Famous Quotes

Quotes by Gilbert K Chesterton

• Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
• Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals nay it is treachery to comrades.
• Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
• No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.
• One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.
• People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
• Science in the modern world has many uses its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
• Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
• The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
• The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
• The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
• The only defensible war is a war of defense.
• The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
• The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
• The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
• The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
• The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
• The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.
• The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
• The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
• The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
• There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
• There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
• Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
• To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
• To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
• 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.
• 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.
• We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
• We make our friends we make our enemies but God makes our next door neighbour.
• What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
• When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
• 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?
• White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
• Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
• Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
• Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.