Quotes by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A yawn is a silent shout.
Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
New roads; new ruts.
But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Journalism consists largely in saying "Lord James is dead" to people who never knew Lord James was alive.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
