Quotes by G.K. Chesterton

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

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

“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.”

“He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.”

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

“While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.”

“Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.”

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

“...vers libre, (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.”

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

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.”

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

“Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”

“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.”

“Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.”