1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

ONCE remove the old arena of theological quarrels, and you will throw open the whole world to the most horrible, the most hopeless, the most endless, the most truly interminable quarrels; the untheological quarrels.

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.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.

Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.