Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 31

• A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Contentment, Artist

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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• The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Religious, Mean, Men

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• Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Long, Spirituality, Mystery

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• There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny Friendship, Good Man, Fool

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• The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Mean, Past

  What's Wrong with theWorld pt. 1, ch. 5 (1910)

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• We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Morality, Justified

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• The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Men, Catholic

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• Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Defeated, Disadvantages, Conqueror

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• Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Pride, Thunder

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “A Hymn”

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

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Literature, Virtue

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• There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, School, Should Have

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• Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Laughter, Inspiration, Pride

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• Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Doubt, Dogma

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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• Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Morning, Night, Up Early

  "Tremendous trifles". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1909.

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• IF we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Hero, Thinking

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• We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Clouds, Weather, Darkness

  William Blake (1910)

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• Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Friendship, Men, Soul

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• The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  People, Losing, Modern

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.175, Simon and Schuster

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• We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Sacrifice, Hatred, Humanity

  "Orthodoxy". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

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• Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Exercise, Sea, Infinite

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Reality, Men, Progress

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• A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Drama, Cities, Fantasy

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• Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Architecture, Difficult

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• The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Belief, Torture, Martyr

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• When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Firsts, Found, First Time

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