Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly,… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these? — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place...The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image