Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story… — 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
