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G. K. Chesterton Quotes
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Time magazine observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his "friendly enemy", said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius." Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. Wikipedia  

✵ 29. May 1874 – 14. June 1936   •   Other names Гилберт Кит Честертон, GK Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton photo
G. K. Chesterton: 229   quotes 18   likes

G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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

G. K. Chesterton

Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)

Men , Evil

“The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.”

G. K. Chesterton

"Holding on to Romanticism" in The Illustrated London News (2 May 1931)

World

“Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"

“When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch. 10 "The Great Dickens Characters"

Appearance

“It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), Ch. II: The Great Victorian Novelists (p. 73)

School , Sincerity

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

G. K. Chesterton

Illustrated London News (16 July 1910)

Funny , Love , People

“When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.”

G. K. Chesterton

The Illustrated London News (14 December 1907)

People , World , Forgetting

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”

G. K. Chesterton

The Speaker (15 December 1900)

Indifference

“Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”

G. K. Chesterton

Daily News (25 February 1905)

Truth

“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?”

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)

God

“He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.”

G. K. Chesterton

Varied Types (1903)

Heart

“About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Everlasting Man

The Everlasting Man (1925)

Men , Sex , Madness

“And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.”

G. K. Chesterton

A popular internet misattribution.[citation needed] A number of variants of the "rain on your parade" theme appear, with different sources
Misattributed

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.”

G. K. Chesterton

Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens Chapter III "Pickwick Papers" (1911)

Love

“For we that fight till the world is free,
We are not easy in victory:
We have known each other too long, my brother,
And fought each other, the world and we.”

G. K. Chesterton

A Song of Defeat (1910)

World , Victory , Fight

“A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.”

G. K. Chesterton book William Blake

"William Blake" (1920)

“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”

G. K. Chesterton

Twelve Types (1903) Charles II

Men , Heart

“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.”

G. K. Chesterton

As quoted in Mackay's The Harvest of a Quiet Eye, A Selection of Scientific Quotations (1977), p. 34

Love , Money , Hope

“Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.”

G. K. Chesterton

As quoted in "The Sleep of Trees" (1980) by Jane Yolen, in Tales of Wonder (1983) by Jane Yolen, p. 33

God , Appearance

“A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

G. K. Chesterton

George Bernard Shaw (1909)

Time

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Innocence of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Blue Cross
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

“The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: Utopia of Usurers (1917), pp. 33-34

Communication

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

G. K. Chesterton

A Short History of England (1917)

“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)

Personality

“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

Boy , Understanding

“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="all+slang+is+metaphor+and+all+metaphor+is+poetry"&pg=PA110#v=onepage"
The Defendant (1901)

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

G. K. Chesterton

Cleveland Press (1 March 1921)

“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)

“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Secret of Father Brown

The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Secret of Father Brown
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

Hope , Soul

“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

God

“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

Men , Religion , Dependency

“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)

Money , Secret

“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
Misattributed

World

“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)

Thinking

“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"

Truth

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

G. K. Chesterton

Magic: A Fantastic Comedy (1913)

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

G. K. Chesterton

A Short History of England (1917)

“A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. … The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: Utopia of Usurers (1917), p. 6

Art

“An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.”

G. K. Chesterton

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

Sincerity

“We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.”

G. K. Chesterton

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

Soul

“His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.”

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)

“Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with "they say" or "don't you know that?" or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.”

G. K. Chesterton

The Superstition of Divorce (1920)

“We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.”

G. K. Chesterton

George Bernard Shaw (1909)

Age

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

G. K. Chesterton

As quoted in an interview in The New York Times (21 November 1930)

Personality

“Art is limitation…. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

G. K. Chesterton book Tremendous Trifles

Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Beauty , Art , Parting

“Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.”

G. K. Chesterton

Source: Utopia of Usurers (1917), p. 37

Religion , Support , Waiting