Inspiring Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton - Page 2

"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"

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity"

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair"

"I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles"

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite"

"Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees"

"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder"

"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"

"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"

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling"

"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper"

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

"Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization"

"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"

"The only defensible war is a war of defense"

"Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men"

"There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect"

"If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride"

"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"

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

"If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not"

"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young"

"What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity"

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

"The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it"

"The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men"

"The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it"

"Half a truth is better than no politics"

"Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel"

"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks"

"A yawn is a silent shout"

"All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry"

"And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet"

"An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered"

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

"There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong"

"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"

"A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things"

"A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice"

"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"

"A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying"

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author"

"A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation"

"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"

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