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Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 33

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The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Suicide, Suicidal, Men
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.53, Simon and Schuster

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Toil, Fool
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.160, Simon and Schuster

...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Wisdom, People, Missing

I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Perspective, Pessimist, Optimist
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

Aristocracy is an atmosphere; it is sometimes a healthy atmosphere; but it is very hard to say when it becomes an unhealthy atmosphere. You can prove that a man is not the son of a king, or that he is not the delegate of a definite number of people. But you cannot prove that a man is not a gentleman.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Kings, Son, Men

Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Democracy, Noses, May

'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Lying, Bed, Made

A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Strong, Men, Garden

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Flower, Dark, Garden

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Needs, Disease, Crime

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Tea, Finals

The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Imagination, Quality

At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Thinking, Tea
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.126, Simon and Schuster

Tea, although an OrientalIs a gentleman at least;Cocoa is a cad and coward,Cocoa is a vulgar beast.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gentleman, Tea, Coward
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “The Song Of Right And Wrong”

To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Justice, Islam, Borders

Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Order, Giving, Alternatives

There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Soldier, Good Man
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a fewgreat hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it istyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Men, Doctors

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Tragedy, Deuces, Comic
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.209, Simon and Schuster

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Love, Beautiful, Two

...but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Lonely, Children, Real
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
People, Mad, Wicked

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Lying, Science, Math
Orthodoxy ch. 2 (1908)

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men, Alive, Detectives

Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Encouragement, Waiting, Virtue
"Utopia of Usurers". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, p. 37, 1917.

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