quotes by G.K. Chesterton

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
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— G.K. Chesterton

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Just going to church doesn't make you a Christian any morethan standing in your garage makes you a car."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
— G.K. Chesterton

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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— G.K. Chesterton

"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. "
— G.K. Chesterton

""Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed."
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— G.K. Chesterton

"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."
— G.K. Chesterton

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

"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. "
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"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."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."
— G.K. Chesterton

"“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.” "
— G.K. Chesterton

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."
— G.K. Chesterton

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean. "
— G.K. Chesterton

"I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes--epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself...But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)

"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."
— G.K. Chesterton