Quotes by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it -- or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.
The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.
The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape Nuts on principle.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords. Lords without anger and honor, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labor and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
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.
Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
If a rhinoceros were to enter this resteraunt now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I would be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.
Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
