Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 33

• Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Clever, Men, Rome

  "The Napoleon of Notting Hill". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1904.

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• A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Running, Long, Mind

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• There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wise, Essentials, Aristocracy

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.189, Simon and Schuster

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• The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  War, Evil, Assumption

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• Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Truth, Mind, Fiction

  The Club of Queer Trades "The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent" (1905)

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• A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Feminist, Modesty, Being A Woman

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• The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Laughter, Angel

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• All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Soul, Damnation, States

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• La mejor prueba de la cultura y la liberalidad de un hombre es su actitud ante las cosas que nunca sucedieron.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

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• I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Crowds, Lost

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2012). “The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton”, p.123, Ignatius Press

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• It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Pain, Mistake, Two

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• 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.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Soul, Faces

  "The Dagger with Wings". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1926.

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• The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Golf, Scotch, Two

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• The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Slang, Streams

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

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• When fishes flew and forests walked
  And figs grew upon thorn,
  Some moment when the moon was blood
  Then surely I was born.
  With monstrous head and sickening cry
  And ears like errant wings,
  The devil's walking parody
  On all four-footed things.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Moon, Blood, Wings

  1900 'The Donkey'.

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• Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Opposites, Church

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• The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Dark, Men

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “The Ballad Of The White Horse”

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• It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Personality, Enemy

  "The Man Who Was Thursday". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Ch. VI : The Exposure, 1908.

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• The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Catholic, Tragedy

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• Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Certain, Uncertainty

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• The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Equality, Discovery, Cost

  "Robert Browning". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1903.

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• Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Men, Feels

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• It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  People, Done, Experts

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• It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Business, Home, Imagination

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• I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wise, Men, Pigs

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