Quotes by G.K. Chesterton

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Its just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics dont hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when youve seen it its still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, its a platitude.

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping ones self unspotted from the world; but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the world well lost. Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth - the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical.

And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as daring, though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.

The true soldier fights

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.

Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, We will not be dictated to, and went off and became stenographers.

Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.

But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.