G. K. Chesterton Quotes

Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?

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

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

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

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

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.

But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover
the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we
must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.
Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them,
contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of
imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Private lives are more important than public reputations.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

A permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.

For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.