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G. K. Chesterton

227 quotes

“Nelson turned his blindest eye On Naples and on liberty.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin, And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon, He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon, And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Strong gongs groaning as the drums beat far.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don John of Austria is going to the war.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not fate; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath, (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade.... (But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is something to have wept as we have wept, It is something to have done as we have done, It is something to have watched when all men slept, And seen the stars which never see the sun. It is something to have smelt the mystic rose, Although it break and leave the thorny rods, It is something to have hungered once as those Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To have seen you and your unforgotten face, Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray, Pure as white lilies in a watery space, It were something, though you went from me today. To have known the things that from the weak are furled, Perilous ancient passions, strange and high; It is something to be wiser than the world, It is something to be older than the sky.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts, And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire In a world of flying loves and fading lusts, It is something to be sure of a desire. Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard; Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen: Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird And the lightning. It is something to have been.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes—that they have done for some time past—they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. ... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis — that is, enforce confession without absolution.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen – that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I judged the Poles by their enemies. And I found it was an almost unfailing truth that their enemies were the enemies of magnanimity and manhood. If a man loved slavery, if he loved usury, if he loved terrorism and all the trampled mire of materialistic politics, I have always found that he added to these affections the passion of a hatred of Poland. She could be judged in the light of that hatred; and the judgment has proved to be right.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. p. 83”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But every man feels in his heart that [...] the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, “Every existence, as such, is good.” On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: People's Library Edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), pp. 283-284
“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 (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'You have no business to be an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things these stupid people call superstitions. Come now, don't you think there's a lot in those old wives' tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say about them as a Catholic?' 'I say I'm an agnostic,' replied Father Brown, smiling. 'Nonsense,' said Aylmer impatiently. 'It's your business to believe things.' 'Well, I do believe some things, of course,' conceded Father Brown; 'and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things.' .”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humour, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.' 'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown. 'Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I'm not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[N]othing is more terrible than a bed; since it is always waiting to be a death-bed.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those dry Deists and hard-headed Utilitarians who stalked the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were very obviously the products of the national religious spirit. The Scottish atheists were unmistakable children of the Kirk. And though they often seemed absurdly detached and dehumanised, the world is now rather suffering for want of such dull lucidity.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has been much debated whether bullies are always cowards; I am content to remark that the admirers of bullies are always, by the very nature of things, trying to be cowards. If they do not always succeed, it is because they have unconscious virtues restraining that obscene worship.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[G]uesses about the fashions of the future are generally quite wide of the mark, because they are founded on a very obvious fallacy. They always imply that public taste will continue to progress in its present direction; which is, in truth, the only thing we know that it will not do. A thing that wanders away in great winding curves may end anywhere; but to turn each curve into a straight line striking out into the void will be wrong in any case.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) said by 1936 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The journalists would appear to be in an almost literal sense the priests of the modern world. They may not rise precisely to the tremendous responsibility which was laid upon Peter, but at least it can be said that whatever they bind on earth is bound on earth, and whatever they loose on earth is loosed on earth. They have essentially and absolutely the same functions that were employed by the old priests, but their power for deceit is even greater and their responsibility to the world even less. A comparison between the priests and the journalists would be striking in many points. [...] The priest's influence and power consisted almost entirely in the fact that he was the only man who brought news. [...] the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1901 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Priests", in The Speaker, vol. 4 (Mather & Crowther, 1901)
“The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. ... The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tolstoy (1903)
“Fine weather encourages individualism. When the whole glittering landscape is cut out as clear as a map—indented by the blue sky as by a blue sea, then each one of us wishes to take his own way, to walk by himself along the roads of the world and conquer for himself the cities of the morning. In the sunlight a man asks for liberty, which is only the divine name for loneliness. But it is in black and bleak conditions that we learn that it is not well for man to be alone; and festivity was discovered in the darkness. Winter encourages that thing called comradeship which modern humanitarians so often seem unable to understand, but which Walt Whitman so wisely perceived to be the permanent foundation of democracy.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1905 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Illustrated London News (1905–1907)
“The object of a ceremony is not to be beautiful, though that is a valuable element. The object of a ceremony is to be ceremonious. Ritual is a need of the human soul — nay, it is rather a need of the human body, like exercise. A man does not take off his hat to a lady because he looks nicer without it; the instance of bald men would be alone sufficient to upset such an explanation. He does it because you must positively do something when you meet a lady, or your whole civilisation goes to pieces; and taking off your hat is easier than taking off your necktie or lying face downwards on the pavement.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1905 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Illustrated London News (1905–1907)
“The riddle of life is simply this: For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Our Notebook", in The Illustrated London Times (2 March 1907) p. 324, col. 3
“There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. [...] A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments ; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world ; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests ; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lord Kitchener (1917), pp. 7–8
“Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Meaning of the Crusade (1920)
“Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not bring me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were party dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Household Gods and Goblins" (1922)