Gilbert Keith Chesterton quotes

“The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“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.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“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.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“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.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton