Big things Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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

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

Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton