When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things.… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
There is only one thing certain and that is that nothing is certain — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made… — 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
