G. K. Chesterton: Trending quotes

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G. K. Chesterton: 458 quotes19 likes

“One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Innocence of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Sins of Prince Saradine
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

“A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.”

G. K. Chesterton

Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce
Misattributed

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

" A Defense of Slang http://books.google.com/books?id=8WpaAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;all+slang+is+metaphor+and+all+metaphor+is+poetry&quot;&pg=PA110#v=onepage" <br class="br">The Defendant (1901)

“The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.”

G. K. Chesterton

According to Larry Azar (Evolution and Other Fairy Tales, AuthorHouse, 2005, p. 470), Chesterton made this statement on 16 March 1907

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

G. K. Chesterton

Cleveland Press (1 March 1921)

“Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes—that they have done for some time past—they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. … I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: Utopia of Usurers (1917), pp. 15-17

“Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Innocence of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Queer Feet
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

“All revolutions are doctrinal — such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

“The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.”

G. K. Chesterton

As quoted in Grace at the Table : Ending Hunger in God's World (1999) by David M. Beckmann abd Arthur R. Simon, p. 156

“A man knocking on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

G. K. Chesterton

The source is actually a 1945 book by Bruce Marshall, The World, The Flesh, and Father Smith, in which he says, "...the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God."
Misattributed

“In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it—or he would be obviously below it.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: Utopia of Usurers (1917), p. 34

“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”

G. K. Chesterton

A Miscellany of Men (1912)

“Q: What's wrong with the world? A: I am.”

G. K. Chesterton

Purportedly a response by Chesterton to the question posed around 1910 by the Times of London (along with other luminaries), but biographer Kevin Belmonte, in 'Defiant Joy: the Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton', was unable to verify. Belmonte surmises its origin in an anecdote that while writing What's Wrong with the World (told in the book's preface), he would delight in telling society ladies that "I have been doing 'What is Wrong' all this morning." http://books.google.com/books?id=1rsXvfW2aiEC <br class="br">Misattributed

“He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), On Algernon Charles Swinburne Ch. III: The Great Victorian Poets (p. 95)

“A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

"A Defence of Humilities"
The Defendant (1901)

“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Club of Queer Trades

The Club of Queer Trades (1905) Ch. 4 "Speculation of the House Agent"

“I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument.”

G. K. Chesterton

Magic: A Fantastic Comedy (1913)