1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.