107 Quotes by G. K. Chesterton

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Sex and breathing are about the only two things that generally work best when they are least worried about. That, I suppose, is why the same sophisticated age that has poisoned the world with Feminism is also polluting it with Breathing Exercises.

Do you remember when we wentUnder a dragon moon,And 'mid volcanic tints of nightWalked where they fought the unknown fightAnd saw black trees on the battle-height,Black thorn on Ethandune?And I thought, "I will go with you,As man with God has gone,And wander with a wandering star,The wandering heart of things that are,The fiery cross of love and warThat like yourself, goes on.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know – that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.