Has beens Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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

Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that…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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it…

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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