G.K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 9

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.
G.K. Chesterton
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
G.K. Chesterton
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
G.K. Chesterton
The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.
G.K. Chesterton
...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
G.K. Chesterton
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
G.K. Chesterton
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
G.K. Chesterton
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
G.K. Chesterton
The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
G.K. Chesterton
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
G.K. Chesterton
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.
G.K. Chesterton
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
G.K. Chesterton
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
G.K. Chesterton
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
G.K. Chesterton
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G.K. Chesterton
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
G.K. Chesterton
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
G.K. Chesterton
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
G.K. Chesterton
There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
G.K. Chesterton
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
G.K. Chesterton
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
G.K. Chesterton
Love is not blind that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
G.K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
G.K. Chesterton
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
G.K. Chesterton