107 Quotes by G. K. Chesterton

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.

Killed a policeman? How Vegetarian! Well, I suppose it was, so long as they didn't eat him.

A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism, and not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism . . . Conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect . . .

It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

At last he came to a strange land, where the rocks and mountain crests seemed as ragged and fantastic as the clouds of sunset, where wild and sudden lights, breaking out in nooks and clefts, were all that lit the sombre twilight of the world.

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her.

The things in this world which are thoroughly insignificant are precisely the things which are singularly rare.

In the modern world, we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not gotten tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.