Selected Essays Quotes

“Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“An enormous number of normal youths are quite abnormal for a time.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“If it can be said that the grandchildren "soon get used" to something that would have made the grandfathers fight duels to the death, it is always assumed that the grandchildren have found a new mode of living, whereas those who fought the duel to the death were already dead. But the psychological fact is exactly the other way. The duellists may have been fastidious or even fantastic, but they were frightfully alive.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. There are two meanings of the word "nervous," and it is not even a physical superiority to be actually without nerves. It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“…it is supposed that all this publicity of self-revelation represents an interest in private life . . . It does really imply that nobody has any inner life; that man is not an end to himself, subject only to the glory of God; or, in short, that biography was not made for man but man for biography.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“For the whole world of mere stunts and scoops and trading and self-advertisement is spiritually a world utterly dead; although it is very noisy. It is, in the very precise and literal meaning of the phrase, a howling wilderness.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“For instance, there is a wild hypothesis now hardening in the minds of many which has nothing to do with any philosophical case for pacifism, let alone peace. It is the notion that not fighting, as such, would prevent somebody else from fighting, or from taking all he wanted without fighting. It assumes that every pacifist is some strange sort of blend of a lion-tamer and a mesmerist, who would hold up invading armies with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Well aware of how offensive I make myself, and with what loathing I may be regarded, in this sentimental age which pretends to be cynical, and in this poetical nation which pretends to be practical, I shall nevertheless continue to practice in public a very repulsive trick or habit--the habit of drawing distinctions; or distinguishing between things that are quite different, even when they are assumed to be the same. I cannot be content with being a Unionist or a Universalist or a Unitarian. I have again and again blasphemed against and denied the perfect Oneness of chalk and cheese; and drawn fanciful distinctions, ornithological or technological, between hawks and handsaws. For in truth I believe that the only way to say anything definite is to define it, and all definition is by limitation and exclusion; and that the only way to say something distinct is to say something distinguishable; and distinguishable from everything else. In short, I think that a man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Men who have no intention of abandoning their country's wealth, not to mention their own, men who rightly insist on comfort for their countrymen and not infrequently for themselves, still seem to have formed a strange idea that they can keep all these things in all conceivable circumstances, solely and entirely by refusing to defend them. They seem to fancy they could bring the whole reign of violence and pride to an end, instantly and entirely, merely by doing nothing. Any party will be better for abandoning that delusion.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“I do not believe that a nation dies save by suicide.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“The Iliad may have been written by one man. It may have been written by a hundred men. But let us remember that there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man. Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as man are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. They will adopt the easier task of making our successful men good.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which along men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deadly surprise that I was quite right.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“And then I saw, in my vision, that just as there are two fires, so there are two revolutions. And I saw that the whole mad modern world is a race between them. Which will happen first--the revolution in which bad things shall perish, or that other revolution in which good things shall perish also?”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Now, if there is one thing of which I have been certain since my boyhood, and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze. All this talk of waiting for experiences in order to write, is simply a confession of incapacity to experience anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“We can only fortify the child on the positive side by giving him health and humour and a trust in God; not omitting (what will much mystify the moderns) an intelligent appreciation of the idea of authority, which is only the other side of confidence, and which alone can suddenly and summarily cast out such devils.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“To love anything is to love its boundaries.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Christ has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“I mean it will be a melancholy relic of the only period in all human history when people were proud of being modern. For though today is always today and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“And when all humanity has agreed on the necessity for something, we may be perfectly certain that some sort of humanitarian will want to destroy it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays