G.K. Chesterton quote: "This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments."

Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity gro...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Are you a devil?"
"I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils i...
G.K. CHESTERTON

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untr...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase him...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the bes...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long a...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally t...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. CHESTERTON

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tr...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the o...
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

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wron...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G.K. CHESTERTON

A tragey means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to de...
G.K. CHESTERTON

We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us fr...
G.K. CHESTERTON

We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has for...
G.K. CHESTERTON

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Nine times out of ten a man’s broad-mindedness is necessarily the narrowest thing about him. This ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not underst...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the ab...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to...
G.K. CHESTERTON

White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as de...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is b...
G.K. CHESTERTON

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians....
G.K. CHESTERTON

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and al...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .
G.K CHESTERTON

An adventure is only an inconvenience, rightly considered.
G.K CHESTERTON

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
G.K CHESTERTON

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
G.K CHESTERTON

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and do...
G.K CHESTERTON

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
G.K CHESTERTON

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be...
G.K. CHESTERTON

In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends
G.K. CHESTERTON

Happiness is a state of the soul; a state in which our natures are full of the wine of an ancient yo...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
G.K. CHESTERTON

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is r...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinar...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of abo...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relat...
G.K. CHESTERTON

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in m...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
G.K. CHESTERTON

A Second Childhood.”

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despot...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
G.K. CHESTERTON

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers bu...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
G.K. CHESTERTON

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
G.K. CHESTERTON

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believi...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roug...
G.K. CHESTERTON

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the ab...
G.K. CHESTERTON

But when ﬁrst the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely th...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is sim...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
G.K. CHESTERTON

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
G.K. CHESTERTON

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
G.K. CHESTERTON

I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princes...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity c...
G.K. CHESTERTON

In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. Th...
G.K. CHESTERTON

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.
G.K. CHESTERTON

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become c...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
G.K. CHESTERTON

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
G.K. CHESTERTON

But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore h...
G.K. CHESTERTON

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G.K. CHESTERTON

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth...
G.K. CHESTERTON

It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now h...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.
G.K. CHESTERTON

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is mor...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror,...
G.K. CHESTERTON

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read mor...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money...
G.K. CHESTERTON

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into th...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Coincidences are spiritual puns.
G.K. CHESTERTON

There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G.K. CHESTERTON

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness double...
G.K. CHESTERTON

...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, ab...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we hav...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war wi...
G.K. CHESTERTON

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a b...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
G.K. CHESTERTON

She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her...
G.K. CHESTERTON

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage t...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would c...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G.K. CHESTERTON

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
G.K. CHESTERTON

... just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable...
G.K. CHESTERTON

And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people (engaged in the old game of Cheat t...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:
"I want to get my haircut. I say, do you k...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back and his mane like a lion's, stood with his great...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is th...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a wal...
G.K. CHESTERTON

In the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
G.K. CHESTERTON

We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksni...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madn...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enou...
G.K. CHESTERTON

But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... But the thing is ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.
G.K. CHESTERTON

No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerne...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. M...
G.K. CHESTERTON

It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Thrift is poetic because it is creative.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself,...
G.K. CHESTERTON

No man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in off...
G.K. CHESTERTON

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.
G.K. CHESTERTON

In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
G.K. CHESTERTON

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...E...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, wo...
G.K. CHESTERTON

An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution...
G.K. CHESTERTON

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings
G.K. CHESTERTON

..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a d...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
G.K. CHESTERTON

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accide...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its mea...
G.K. CHESTERTON

[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run...
G.K. CHESTERTON

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already, but that God could ha...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just becau...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in a workhouse. The only solid comfort is tha...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organized resistance."
"Eh?" said Sy...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed...
G.K. CHESTERTON

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens...
G.K. CHESTERTON

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for edu...
G.K. CHESTERTON

A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A mode...
G.K. CHESTERTON

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, b...
G.K. CHESTERTON

There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over.

"There is," sai...
G.K. CHESTERTON

He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of c...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But wha...
G.K. CHESTERTON

Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,
G.K. CHESTERTON

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
G.K. CHESTERTON

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practica...
G.K. CHESTERTON

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's wha...
G.K. CHESTERTON

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
G.K. CHESTERTON

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautifu...
G.K. CHESTERTON

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
G.K. CHESTERTON

My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperat...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
G.K. CHESTERTON

Can you not see, […] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but th...
G.K. CHESTERTON

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things...
G.K. CHESTERTON

The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down; the progressives believe it ...
G.K. CHESTERTON

This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

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G.K. Chesterton

This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

G.K. Chesterton

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