1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.

Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.

Posting a letter and getting married [sic] are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable

Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.