Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God — 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
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there… — 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
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the… — 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
If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to… — 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
Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror… — 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 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 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 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
Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to… — 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
In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was… — 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
At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith… — 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
