How much larger your life would be if you were smaller in it... — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will… — 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
The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic,… — 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 are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share
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 nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which made him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share
Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
