1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully interferes.

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.