Gilbert K. Chesterton
68 quotes
Biography
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English Christian apologist writer. Chesterton's wit, paradoxical style, and defence of tradition made him a dominant figure in early 20th-century literature.
"The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."
"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."
"Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all."
"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling."
"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."
"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."
"When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude."
"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."
"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past."
"All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change."
"Man does not live by soap alone and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it."
"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."
"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."
"All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change."
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die."
"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense."
"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."
"The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself."
"The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself."
"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"
"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."
"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head."
"White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white."
"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache."