Gilbert K. Chesterton
Writer
1874-05-29
Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
-
Man does not live by soap alone and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
Read quote -
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
Read quote -
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Read quote -
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
Read quote -
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
Read quote -
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
Read quote -
I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
Read quote -
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
Read quote -
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
Read quote -
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Read quote -
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Read quote -
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Read quote -
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Read quote -
Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Read quote -
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Read quote -
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Read quote -
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Read quote -
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
Read quote -
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
Read quote -
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Read quote