There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
“Child Psychology and Nonsense” (15 Oct 1921)
The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
“Holding on to Romanticism,” The Illustrated London News (2 May 1931)
Father Brown laid down his cigar and said carefully: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
“The Point of a Pin,” The Scandal of Father Brown (1925)
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
“The Point of a Pin,” The Scandal of Father Brown (1935)
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
It’s not the world that’s gotten so much worse, but the news coverage that’s gotten so much better.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
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?
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the king.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
(Attributed)
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
A Miscelleny of Men, “The Angry Author: His Farewell (1912)
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
A Short History of England (1917)
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
A Short History of England (1917)
All government is an ugly necessity.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
A Short History of England (1917)
It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
All Things Considered, “The Case for the Ephemeral” (1908)
There are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader, ch. 17 [ed. R. Knille] (1985)
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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Autobiography (1936)
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington ….
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Autobiography (1936)
A man has been lucky in marrying the women he loves. But he is luckier in loving the woman he marries.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Brave New Family
ed. Alvaro de Silva (1990)
When anyone goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Charles Dickens, ch. 1 (1906)
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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Charles Dickens, Ch. 11 (1906)
The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and the princess lived happily, and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other. Most marriages, I think, are happy marriages; but there is no such thing as a contented marriage. The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Chesterton on Dickens (1911)
The dispute that goes on between Macbeth and his wife about the murder of Duncan is almost word for word a dispute which goes on at any suburban breakfast table about something else. It is merely a matter of changing ‘Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers’ into ‘Infirm of purpose, give me the postage stamps.’
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Chesterton on Shakespeare
ed. Dorothy Collins (1972)
The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
G.F. Watts (1906)
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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Generally Speaking, ch. 20 (1929)
Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics (1905)
It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 1 (1905)
Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 12 (1905)
As enunciated today, “progress” is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 2 (1905)
Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 20 (1905)
Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 20 (1905)
Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 20 (1905)
The modern world … holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 20 (1905)
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Heretics, ch. 3 (1905)
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Illustrated London News (19 Apr 1930)
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Illustrated London News (23 Oct 1909)
War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Illustrated London News, column (24 Jul. 1915)
CONJURER: Doctor, there are about a thousand reasons why I should not tell you how I really did that trick. But one will suffice, because it is the most practical of all.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
DOCTOR: Well? And why shouldn’t you tell me?
CONJURER:”Because you wouldn’t believe me if I did.
Magic (1913)
This man’s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Manalive (1912)
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Orthodoxy, “The Logic of Elfland” (1908)
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Orthodoxy, ch. 3, “The Suicide of Thought” (1909)
But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But 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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Orthodoxy, ch. 7 “The Eternal Revolution” (1908)
Full text.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Orthodoxy (1908)
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Orthodoxy, Ch. 4, “The Ethics of England” (1908)
A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Orthodoxy, ch. 5 (1908)
JACKSON: Truth is one’s own conception of things.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
CHESTERTON: The Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one’s own conception is true or not.
Platitudes Undone
commentary on Holbrook Jackson's Platitudes in the Making (1997)
America has never been quite normal.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)
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