Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 20

• A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Peace, War

  "The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton". Vol.I: Non-Fiction,

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• I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Rights, Giving, House

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• We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Drinking, Beer, Thank God

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.47, Simon and Schuster

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• the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspiring, New Year, Inspiration

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• The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wall, Sunset, Divorce

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• The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Pain, Pressure

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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• 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 K. Chesterton

  Filled Up, Acting, Literature

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• People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Yellow

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• In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Doubt, Enlightenment, Arrogant

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• '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 K. Chesterton

  Mother, Country, Patriotic

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• The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Fear, Ideas

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• I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Thinking, Talking

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• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

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• The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Brother, Sleep, Law

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• Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Roots, Drawing

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• Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Jesus, Reality

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• It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Tired, May, Orthodoxy

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• One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Elephants, Plot, Odd

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Childhood, Miracle, World

  "Autobiography". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1936.

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• The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Caring, Thinking

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

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Running, Wine, Rivers

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Realizing, Goodness

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

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• The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Weed, Gratitude, Appreciation

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• Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Doubt, Madmen, Causation

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• Not only does "orthodox" no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Doe, Orthodox

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