"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

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

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

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

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

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

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
— G.K. Chesterton

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

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

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"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

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."
— G.K. Chesterton

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."
— 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

"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

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
— G.K. Chesterton

"How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win."
— G.K. Chesterton

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

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."
— G.K. Chesterton

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

"...it (feminism) is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,"
— G.K. Chesterton

"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see."
— G.K. Chesterton

"People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable."
— G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)

"It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder."
— 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

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."
— G.K. Chesterton

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

"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
— G.K. Chesterton

"One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance."
— G.K. Chesterton

"We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws."
— G.K. Chesterton

"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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Wisdom of Father Brown)

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."
— G.K. Chesterton

"[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

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

"The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous."
— G.K. Chesterton