Gilbert K. Chesterton
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.Collection: Funny
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.Collection: Silence
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.Collection: Wisdom
What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.Collection: Self
An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.Collection: Monday
The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.Collection: Men
The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.Collection: Fighting
Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.Collection: Gratitude
The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.Collection: School
Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.Collection: Government
A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.Collection: Divine Revelation
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.Collection: Mother
If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.Collection: Morality
A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.Collection: Men
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.Collection: Giving Up
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.Collection: Atheist
The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.Collection: Gratitude
Nothing is certain by uncertainty.Collection: Certain
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.Collection: Animal
Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.Collection: Friendship
The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.Collection: People
It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.Collection: People
It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.Collection: Business
The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.Collection: Courage
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.Collection: Equality
Surprise is the secret of joy.Collection: Joy
I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.Collection: Wise
The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.Collection: Fashion
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.Collection: Pain
The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.Collection: Suicide
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.Collection: Men
...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.Collection: Wisdom
I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.Collection: Perspective
Aristocracy is an atmosphere; it is sometimes a healthy atmosphere; but it is very hard to say when it becomes an unhealthy atmosphere. You can prove that a man is not the son of a king, or that he is not the delegate of a definite number of people. But you cannot prove that a man is not a gentleman.Collection: Kings
Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.Collection: Democracy
'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.Collection: Lying
A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.Collection: Strong
I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.Collection: Needs
Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Men
The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.Collection: Men
There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only instinct I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as the sin of avarice.Collection: People
It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.Collection: Fashion
Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.Collection: Men
Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.Collection: Integrity
History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retracedCollection: History
We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.Collection: Clever
[A pacifist is] the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society.Collection: Enemy
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.Collection: Men