549 Quotes by G.K. Chesterton

But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that.

Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England.

There is no harm in our criticizing foreigners, if only we would also criticize ourselves. In other words, the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old humility.

The great march of metal destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is the reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake.

Father Brown: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland, I only said it was always dangerous.

Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens.

The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

The paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings

[A man] is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophical theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.