1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

THERE are no wise few; for in all men rages the folly of the Fall. Take your strongest, happiest, handsomest, best born, best bred, best instructed men on earth and give them special power for half an hour and because they are men they will begin to [perform] badly ...

When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

We are passing into a social phase in which unless a heroic effort is made for human dignity and freedom, gold will be the sole method of government and therefore the sole standard of manners.

Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.