Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Gilbert K. Chesterton