g k chesterton quotes

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." - Everlasting Man, 1925

"The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are." - Introduction to The Defendant

"I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is." - Uses of Diversity

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." - ILN, 4/19/30

"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908

"Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." - A Miscellany of Men

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." - ILN 6-3-22


"A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."


- Gilbert K. Chesterton

"What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table."




G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.31-32


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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Gilbert K. Chesterton