G. K. Chesterton Quotes
G. K. Chesterton Quotes. Below is a collection of famous G. K. Chesterton quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by G. K. Chesterton. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
By G. K. Chesterton
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
By G. K. Chesterton
If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would simply be running with the blood of philanthropists.
By G. K. Chesterton
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
By G. 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 ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
By G. K. Chesterton
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution
By G. K. Chesterton
Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.
By G. K. Chesterton
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
By G. K. Chesterton
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
By G. K. Chesterton
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
By G. K. Chesterton
There is nothing wrong with Americans, except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
By G. K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
By G. K. Chesterton
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
By G. K. Chesterton
The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.
By G. K. Chesterton
The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.
By G. K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably generally they are the same people.
By G. K. Chesterton
My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, My mother, drunk or sober.
By G. K. Chesterton
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
By G. K. Chesterton
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
By G. K. Chesterton
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
By G. K. Chesterton
If a rhinoceros were to enter this resteraunt now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I would be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.
By G. K. Chesterton