G.K. Chesterton Quotes

What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity: people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humourist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity, where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to be found.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.

All government is an ugly necessity.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

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.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

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

The center of every man's existence is a dream.