G. K. Chesterton Quotes

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

"When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you,
be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition of
life."

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

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.

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

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.

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

Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert-himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

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

The journalists would appear to be in an almost literal sense the priests of the modern world. They may not rise precisely to the tremendous responsibility which was laid upon Peter, but at least it can be said that whatever they bind on earth is bound on earth, and whatever they loose on earth is loosed on earth. They have essentially and absolutely the same functions that were employed by the old priests, but their power for deceit is even greater and their responsibility to the world even less. A comparison between the priests and the journalists would be striking in many points. [...] The priest's influence and power consisted almost entirely in the fact that he was the only man who brought news. [...] the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.

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