G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.