G. K. Chesterton Quotes

“A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.”

“A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.”

“A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.”

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

“Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

“Coincidences are spiritual puns.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”

“Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.”

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”

“Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

“Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.”

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

“He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.”

“How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.”

“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”

“Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”

“I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.”

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

“I don't deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”

“I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.”

“I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”

“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

“If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.”