Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 43

• Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Relationship, Uncles, Men

  28 Copy quote

• The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dog, Drinking, Men

  4 Copy quote

• Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Retirement, People, Merit

  10 Copy quote

• A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Clouds, Sky, People

  7 Copy quote

• Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Unique, Men, Mad

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

  4 Copy quote

• Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Alternatives, Incapacity, Propositions

  4 Copy quote

• Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Bed, Half, Way

  4 Copy quote

• There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Two, People

  4 Copy quote

• While once it was the rank and file that cheered with all the partisan passions at their heights, today it is the party leaders who are cheering themselves; and all by themselves. The mob that is their audience is in one vast universal trance, thinking about something else.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Leadership, Cheer, Party

  4 Copy quote

• He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Time, Sleep

  4 Copy quote

• A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Running, Women, Half

  4 Copy quote

• The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Women, Average, Order

  4 Copy quote

• There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Book, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Buddhism, Giving

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Art is the signature of man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Men, Signatures

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Part I: On the Creature Called Man, 1925.

  4 Copy quote

• Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Evil, Levels

  "The Flying Stars: A Father Brown Mystery". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1911.

  4 Copy quote

• The Devil's walking parody; On all four-footed things.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Horse, Devil, Four

  1900 'The Donkey'.

  4 Copy quote

• This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic-that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Men, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Hands, People

  4 Copy quote

• But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Taken, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Spring, Flower, Eye

  10 Copy quote

• He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Girl, Cutting, Garden

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.283, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

• Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Food, Offering, Three

  5 Copy quote

• Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Doors, Knocking

  4 Copy quote

• As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Long, Heaven

  4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

C. S. Lewis

Hilaire Belloc

Arthur Conan Doyle

Charles Dickens

Agatha Christie

Dale Ahlquist

George MacDonald

J. R. R. Tolkien