Gilbert Keith Chesterton quotes

“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A yawn is a silent shout.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

— Gilbert Keith Chesterton