1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.

No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.