GK Chesterton (1874-1936)

Quotes

• Any time you pull down a fence, always ask why it was put there in the first place.

• The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

• If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

• I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

• Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.

• The classes that wash most are those that work least.

• A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

• Nowadays a citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.

• Coincidences are spiritual puns.

• The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

• What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.

• There is at the back of every artist's mind, a pattern or type of Architecture.

• One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

• Nietzche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.

• You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

• The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

• Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

• Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

• The simplification of anything is always sensational.

• To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.