G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Quotes

• A dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing can go against it.

• Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

• Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

• Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

• Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and not tried.

• If a rhinoceros were to enter this resteraunt now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I would be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.

• He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

• His horror is wild, but it is a sane horror.

• The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen.

• Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

• The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

• Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong deisre to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

• Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

• Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

• I do not believe in a fate that falls on all men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

• Every man is important is he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

• Beware of no man more than yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

• Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as on a root.

• Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.