G. K. Chesterton Quotes

(periodical).

Aphorisms

I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.

—An Accident, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

—The Maniac, Orthodoxy (1908)

… marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

—Manalive (1912)

Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

—Introduction in Defence of Everything Else, Orthodoxy (1908)

No man knows he is young while he is young.

—The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (1936)

Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute.

—Introduction in Defence of Everything Else, Orthodoxy (1908)

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

—George Bernard Shaw (1910)

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 Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (1936)

It is generally a very bad sign when one is trusted very much by one’s employers.

—The Modern Slave, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.

—The Advantages of Having One Leg, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Riddles are easy to remember because they are hard to guess.

—Manalive (1912)

It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.

—The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

A culture must never be judged by its cultured people.

—The Fortnightly Review, August 1935

[Cited by Dale Ahlquist in The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare (2012)]

The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is.

—Chaucer (1932)

… I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about talking of women in the plural at all …

—Fads and Public Opinion, What I Saw in America (1922)

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

—Manalive (1912)

New York is a cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans.

—A Meditation in Broadway, What I Saw in America (1922)

It is always the secure who are humble.

—A Defence of Humility, The Defendant (1902)

When we are genuinely happy, we think we are unworthy of happiness.

—A Defence of Humility, The Defendant (1902)

All ceremony … consists in the reversal of the obvious. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women.

—The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

… the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist.

—A Defence of Skeletons, The Defendant (1902)

One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

—A Defence of Skeletons, The Defendant (1902)

There is no such thing as fighting on the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning side.

—Wanted, an Unpractical Man, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

… the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break.

—The Romance of Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy (1908)

Madmen are always serious; they go mad from lack of humour.

—The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

The man who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies, that they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. They go out against a bird with nets and against a fish with arrows.

—Mr. Bernard Shaw, Heretics (1905)

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

—The Unfinished Temple, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.

—Mr. Bernard Shaw, Heretics (1905)

Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle point is as fixed as the extreme point.

—Wanted, an Unpractical Man, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

A siege may be defined as a peace plus the inconvenience of war.

—The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

—The Enemies of Property, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

Whatever makes men feel old is mean—an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great—a great war or a love-story.

—The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

A very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere.

—George Bernard Shaw (1910)

I do not propose to prove here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that it is a medicine and not a wine.

—The Homelessness of Jones, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.… Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

—Wisdom and the Weather, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

No man who is in love thinks that any one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children.

—The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

It is not only true that it takes all sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its failures.

—George Bernard Shaw (1910)

Father Brown had heard the story. But he knew that he never knew a story until he knew the characters in the story.

—The Vampire of the Village, Strand Magazine (1936)

I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do.

—The Case for the Ephemeral, All Things Considered (1909)

… the greatest happiness that has been known since Eden is the happiness of the unhappy.

—Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

—On Running After One’s Hat, All Things Considered (1909)

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.

—Limericks and Counsels of Perfection, All Things Considered (1909)

Common sense is a wild thing, savage, and beyond rules …

—Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)

If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think it wrong.

—Phonetic Spelling, All Things Considered (1909)

The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax.

—George Bernard Shaw (1910)

… the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.

—Cockneys and Their Jokes, All Things Considered (1909)

The good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music.

—The Perfect Game, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

… in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

—The Queen and the Suffragettes, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

Every new religion bores us with the same stale rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life.

—George Bernard Shaw (1910)

The end of life is not tragic like the end of love.

—Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)

Art

Rembrandt declared the sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a Greek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, a boldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.

—A Defence of Ugly Things, The Defendant (1902)

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

—The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (1936)

There’s nothing needs such mathematical precision as a wild caricature. I’ve dabbled a little in drawing myself, and I assure you that to put one dot where you want it is a marvel …

—The Face in the Target, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922)

There are, as we say, certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that everything that is pictorial suggests, without naming or defining. There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

—A Defence of Heraldry, The Defendant (1902)

Nature intended every human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its living and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hacked off noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and repulsive faces beautiful.

—A Defence of Ugly Things, The Defendant (1902)

It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines stand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven from end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a nose jut out decisively, we like to see the red hair of a friend stand up hardily in bristles upon his head, we like to see his mouth broad and clean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us like all this; it is not a question of humour.

—A Defence of Ugly Things, The Defendant (1902)

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

—Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy, Heretics (1905)

… mention must be made of what is beyond all question the most interesting and most supremely personal of all the elements in the painter’s designs and draughtsmanship. That is, of course, his magnificent discovery of the artistic effect of the human back. The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor. It is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered the thing has an eerie truth about it. Eden may be behind our backs, or Fairyland. But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts has realised this as no one in art or letters has realised it in the whole history of the world: it has made him great. There is one possible exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that their prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind. I do not know whether even Watts would dare to paint that.

—G. F. Watts (1909)

Working in wood is the supreme example of creation; creation in a material which resists just enough and not an iota too much. It was surely no wonder that the greatest who ever wore the form of man was a carpenter.… All pigments and colour materials have one supreme advantage over mere diamonds and amethysts. They are, so to speak, ancestors as well as descendants; they propagate an infinite progeny of images and ideas. If we look at a solid bar of blue chalk we do not see a thing merely mechanical and final. We see bound up in that blue column a whole fairyland of potential pictures and tales. No other material object gives us this sense of multiplying itself. If we leave a cigar in a corner we do not expect that we shall find it next day surrounded by a family of cigarettes. A diamond ring does not contribute in any way to the production of innumerable necklaces and bracelets. But the chalks in a box, or the paints in a paint-box, do actually embrace in themselves an infinity of new possibilities. A cake of Prussian blue contains all the sea stories in the world, a cake of emerald green encloses a hundred meadows, a cake of crimson is compounded of forgotten sunsets.

—The Speaker, August 31, 1901 [The Coloured Lands: Fairy Stories, Comic Verse and Fantastic Pictures (1938)]

Jane Austen

No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains.… She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic.

—The Great Victorian Novelists, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man.

—Folly and Female Education, What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

… when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality; and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes, never weak in her own way—and Scott very often is.

—The Great Victorian Novelists, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontes or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontes’ heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot’s. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities.

—The Great Victorian Novelists, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire.… Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a