We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. — 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
The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else.… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only… — 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
We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the… — 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
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
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
