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G. K. Chesterton quotes
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(54)
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“When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“For in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast'; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith...”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are...”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“These 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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more valuable than the democracy it declares.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“a fundamental quality in the female tradition . . . The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“Man, we say, has two sides, the specialist side where he must have subordination, and the social side where he must have equality.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe?”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
“Comradeship is obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection; it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink water; but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
What's Wrong with the World
“there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Orthodoxy
“There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.”
G. K. Chesterton
,
Heretics
view all 54 quotes
Related topics
education
truth
future
strength
action
faith
vote
division
politics
women
reason
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weakness
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nature
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Related sources
Heretics
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Orthodoxy
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