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G. K. Chesterton Quotes
1874–1936 England
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was a British writer whose prolific and diverse output included works of philosophy, ontology, poetry, play writing, journalism, public lecturing and debating, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics (particularly for Catholicism), and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. He has been called the "prince of paradox".
England Autobiographers Conservatives Critics Essayists Also known as: Chesterton, Chesterton, G. K., Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, G K Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton, GK Chesterton
Random G. K. Chesterton quote
299 quotes
Are they clinging to their crosses?
Poems (1917)
Small sins are sometimes harder to confess than big ones... but that's why it's important to confess them.
Don't you know Sunday? Don't you know that his jokes are always so big and simple that one has never thought of them?
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
It is all as of old, the empty clangour,
Poems (1917)
We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.
White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
Poems (1917)
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
Poems (1917)
Yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.
The Dagger with Wings (1926)
[N]othing is more terrible than a bed; since it is always waiting to be a death-bed.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)
But since he stood for England
The Flying Inn (1914)
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
A stiff apology is a second insult.
Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.
The Defendant (1901)
These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it.
Charles Dickens (1906)
The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.
Charles Dickens (1906)
Men that are men again: Who goes home?
The Flying Inn (1914)
A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
Utopia of Usurers (1917)
'Well, I do believe some things, of course,' conceded Father Brown; 'and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things.'
The Dagger with Wings (1926)
'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'.
The Defendant (1901)
They then go and do something else.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
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