Gilbert K. Chesterton
Half a truth is better than no politics.Collection: Politics
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.Collection: Life
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.Collection: Sports
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
A yawn is a silent shout.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.