Quotes by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
