1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

Whatever the word “great” means, Dickens was what it means.

Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s.

The center of every man’s existence is a dream.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.

Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other’s.

As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman’s arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.