Writer · English · 1874 – 1936 · 142 quotes
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Writer · English · 1874 – 1936
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
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 does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Half a truth is better than no politics.
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
