1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the government. Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history; but it is written most plainly across the recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin. There the government is the God, and all the more the God, because it proclaims aloud in accents of thunder ... one essential commandment, Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.

The ignorant pronounce it Frood To cavil or applaud The well-informed pronounce it Froyd But I pronounce it Fraud.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .

Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.

The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.