The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Where does a wise man kick a pebble? On the beach. Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. — 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
There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things.… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it… — 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
