Famous Quotes

Quotes by Gilbert K Chesterton

• 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.