A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth? — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was.… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been reversed. Nowadays the part of… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
I am myself so exceedingly Nordic, as far as physical constitution is concerned, that I can enjoy almost any weather except what… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously:… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that… — 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
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to… — 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
