Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

New roads; new ruts.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Among the very rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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 around.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

— 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 chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only instinct I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as the sin of avarice.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

No man knows he is young while he is young.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The only argument against losing faith is that you also lose hope – and generally charity.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton