Gilbert K. Chesterton quotes:

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

New roads; new ruts.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

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

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would simply be running with the blood of philanthropists.

It is always the secure who are humble.

The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?

There is only one reason an intelligent person doesn't believe in miracles. He or she believes in materialism.

This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.

Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. They can't see the problem if they are looking in the wrong place. They can't see the problem if they have blinders on - for 'none are so blind as those that will not see'.

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

A yawn is a silent shout.

Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

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.

The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.

Tea, although an OrientalIs a gentleman at least;Cocoa is a cad and coward,Cocoa is a vulgar beast.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.