1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.

A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions - the idea of property... Property is merely the art of the democracy... One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.