G. K. Chesterton Quotes

I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul; a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he were without pride he would not care.

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

"...If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."

It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism had ever had a chance, outside that semi-Mongolian wilderness where it actually flourishes. But, so far as we are concerned, what has broken up households and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and Power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers.

Father Brown: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland, I only said it was always dangerous.

"I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet."

Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

"I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime."

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

Modesty is always beautiful