Gilbert K. Chesterton
64 quotations
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
Half a truth is better than no politics.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
New roads; new ruts.
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
A yawn is a silent shout.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.