G.K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 3

The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

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

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

You say you are a poet of law; I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

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

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

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.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

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.

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.