G Chesterton Quotes

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

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.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

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

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

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

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. a

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.