G.K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 4

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.

It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

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.

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

it will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

The chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist.