G. K. Chesterton Quotes

G. K. Chesterton

"Shouldn't atheists have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?"


"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." 


"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost." 


"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously." 


"Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly," 


"It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands." 


"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." 


"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination." 


"It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything." 


"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?" 


"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 merely happen to be walking about."


"I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles." 


"[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."


"Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out." 


"We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty." 


"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."


"The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland." 


"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world." 


"Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much." 


"Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble." 


"With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand." 


"That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child." 


"Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish." 


"There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect."


"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. "


 "The things we see every day are the things we never see at all." 


 "When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale." 


"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world." 


"In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and loves flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone."


"The simplification of anything is always sensational." 


"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all." 


"I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet."


"The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange." 


"In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness." 


"I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward." 


"Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home."