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Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes about Children

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Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Hope, Children, Dragons

children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Desire, Kites

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christmas, Gratitude, Children

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Philosophy, Passing On

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Enough, Dare
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.328, Simon and Schuster

When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Giving, Advice

The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Destiny, Men

A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Hero, Fighting

The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Mother, Children, Father

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, War, Views

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Baby, Children, Dragons
"Tremendous Trifles". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1909.

How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Motherhood, Careers
"What's Wrong with the World". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton (Part Three: Feminism, or The Mistake About Woman, Chapter 3: The Emancipation of Domesticity), 1910.

The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Baby, Children, Lying
"The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christmas, Summer, Children

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Love, Children, Justice
"The Coloured Lands". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1938.

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Fear, Ideas

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Mother, Sex, Children

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Men, Catholic

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

...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

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education, Children, People

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Strong, Children, Knights
"Tremendous Trifles". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1909.

Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales-because they find them romantic.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Baby, Children, Boys
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Moving, Butterfly
"The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Two, Giving

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