Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 34

• Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Pain, Smell, Vices

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• Surprise is the secret of joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Joy, Secret, Surprise

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• A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Toil, Fool

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.160, Simon and Schuster

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• ...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, People, Missing

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• Aristocracy is an atmosphere; it is sometimes a healthy atmosphere; but it is very hard to say when it becomes an unhealthy atmosphere. You can prove that a man is not the son of a king, or that he is not the delegate of a definite number of people. But you cannot prove that a man is not a gentleman.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kings, Son, Men

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• Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Democracy, Noses, May

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• 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lying, Bed, Made

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• A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Strong, Men, Garden

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• The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Suicide, Suicidal, Men

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.53, Simon and Schuster

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• Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Flower, Dark, Garden

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• I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Tea, Finals

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• At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have
  any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Thinking, Tea

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.126, Simon and Schuster

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• I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Needs, Disease, Crime

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• Tea, although an OrientalIs a gentleman at least;Cocoa is a cad and coward,Cocoa is a vulgar beast.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Gentleman, Tea, Coward

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “The Song Of Right And Wrong”

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• We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Blow, Keys

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• To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Justice, Islam, Borders

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• We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Ideas, Racist

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• Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Order, Giving, Alternatives

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• There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Soldier, Good Man

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a fewgreat hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it istyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Men, Doctors

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• ...but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lonely, Children, Real

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

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• There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  People, Mad, Wicked

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• A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Alive, Detectives

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• 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.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Encouragement, Waiting, Virtue

  "Utopia of Usurers". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, p. 37, 1917.

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• Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Tragedy, Deuces, Comic

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.209, Simon and Schuster

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