549 Quotes by G.K. Chesterton

There nearly always is a method in madness.

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

...his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite asinfinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.