Common 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