G. K. Chesterton Quotes

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

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

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

"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."

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

There nearly always is a method in madness.

It seems to me,' said the other, 'That you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.'
By George!' said Syme facing round and looking at him, 'What a clever chap you are!

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

Men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

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

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of
which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and
already weary of hearing what he has never heard.