G.K. Chesterton Quotes

“After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'.”
― Ian Ker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography

“the function of the imagination for Chesterton is not to make the notional and theoretical concrete and real as for Newman, but to make settled things strange;”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“Unlike his brother, who professed not even to wish to believe, Chesterton ‘always retained a sort of lingering loyalty or vague sympathy with the traditions of the past; so that, even during the period when I practically believed in nothing, I believed in what some have called “the wish to believe”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“Chesterton’s second book of selected journalism was published in October 1902. Twelve Types consisted of articles from the Speaker, the Daily News, and one from the Literary Gazette, with some revisions and additions.”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“exactly like the Imperialist idea of war’, as both Socialists and Imperialists ‘always assumed that they would win the war’. But then Belloc wrote his poem ‘The Rebel’, ‘a very violent and bitter poem’ and ‘the only revolutionary poem I ever read, that suggested that there was any plan for making an attack’.”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“It seems terrible to think of so much force going out of the world suddenly, to say nothing of the blacker void left to those to whom that great heart was more thoroughly known … Somewhere, doubtless, in the million problems of new stars and unfinished creations, in the campaigns of God, some good thing was wavering or at bay and in the dark hour that strong name was remembered…. But we have to lose her. Still, I like to think of this—rather to be sure of it.”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“Gratitude for existence and life implied gratitude to someone, and it seems from Chesterton’s Notebook that his new-found ‘orthodoxy’ at first simply meant that Chesterton reverted to the Unitarian theism of the Revd Stopford Brooke.”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“I never met with such parental devotion or conjugal sympathy more strong than they were in the exceptional woman who was his mother; or with greater kindliness—to say nothing of other sterling qualities—than that of his father, the business man whose feeling for literature and all beautiful things worked so much upon his sons in childhood. The parents made their home a place of happiness for their two boys’ many friends …7”
― Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“It has been found difficult; and left untried.’ It is not that people have ‘got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of’.”
― Ian T. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography

“However, what he objected to in the typical socialist Utopia was that it made sharing rather than giving and receiving ‘the highest or most human of altruistic pleasures’.”
― Ian T. Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography