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Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 25

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Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a

Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Science, Law, America

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Flower, Dark, Sky

I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Philosophy, Men, Thinking

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Pride, Thinking, Idiot
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Smart, Men, Generous Man
A Miscellany of Men "The Miser and His Friends" (1912)

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 alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Past, Men, Knowing

If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Leadership, Firsts, Authority

They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Travel, Mind

There is no such thing as Success....That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Mean, Successful, Wealth

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christian, Atheist, Taste
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.127, Simon and Schuster

There is no bigot like the atheist.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Atheist, Bigots

There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Atheist, Atheism, Argument

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Atheist, Men, Logic

Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Atheist, Men, Sacred

Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Atheist, Manage

The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Suicidal, People, Effort
The Defendant introduction (1901)

The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Swings, Ideas

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Progress, Age, Minorities

[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
War, Revolution, Generations

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
America, Voting, Democracy

It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Football, Party, Fighting

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Mean, Men, Poverty

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Inspirational, Home, Adventure
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.272, Simon and Schuster

Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Philosophy, Real, Science

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Science, Long, History

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