Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 51

• When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Deities, Looks, Might

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

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• Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Gratitude, Duty, Difficult

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• Fairy tales are more than true.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dragons, Fairy Stories, Fairy Tale

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• Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Father, Mean, Men

  'Orthodoxy' (1908) ch. 4

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• English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Party, Government, Two

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• Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Truth, Memories, Use

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• The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Learning, Past, Romance

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• The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Believe, Men

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• All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Sunset, Nocturnal, Architecture

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• We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Vices

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.148, Simon and Schuster

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• We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Age, Littles

  "George Bernard Shaw". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1909.

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• I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Fighting, People

  "The Flying Inn". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1914.

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• The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kindness, Character, Doe

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

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• Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Dickens

  "Charles Dickens". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1906.

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• The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Moving, Errors, Long

  "The Victorian Age in Literature" by Gilbert K. Chesterton, (p. 17), 1963.

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• In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it or he would be obviously below it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Destiny, Men, Doctrine

  "Utopia of Usurers". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, p. 34, 1917.

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• A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Reform, Doe

  "The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1990.

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• America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  America, Delicacy, Coarse

  "Charles Dickens". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1906.

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• Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Genius, Might

  "Orthodoxy" by Gilbert K. Chesterton, (Ch. IV), 1908.

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• If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Want, Behinds

  "The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1911.

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• If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Done, Danger, Ought

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (1927). “The Secret of Father Brown”

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• Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Horse, Cutting, White

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

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• The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Ideas, Guessing

  "The Victorian Age in Literature". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies, p. 24, 1913.

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• It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Intelligent, Unique

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

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• Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  War, Past, Ideas

  "Daily News", February 18, 1905.

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