Some Great G.K. Chesterton Quotes

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a journalist, literary critic, novelist, and poet who expounded on almost every subject. I’ve been reading some of his books and books about him in recent weeks, and while I’ll resist the urge to write more about him now, I thought you’d enjoy some of these G.K. Chesterton quotes as much as I have: 

“The only object of existence is to mean something.”

”Sorrow and pessimism are opposite things, since sorrow is founded on the value of something, and pessimism upon the value of nothing.”

“Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.”

“The most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.”

“Astonishment at the universe is not mysticism but a transcendental common sense.”

“The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure, but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter and a kind of young reverence.”

“Thanks are the highest form of thought.” 

“Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

“The test of all happiness is gratitude.”

“There are twenty minor poets who can describe fairly impressively an eternity of agony; there are very few even of the eternal poets who can describe ten minutes of satisfaction.”

“Happiness is a state of the soul — a state in which our natures are full of the wine of an ancient youth, in which banquets last forever, and roads lead everywhere, where all things are under the exuberant leadership of faith, hope, and charity.”

“The best and last world of mysticism is an almost agonizing sense of the preciousness of everything, the preciousness of the whole universe, which is like an exquisite and fragile vase, and among other things the preciousness of other people’s tea-cups.” 

“Our age is obviously the Nonsense Age; the wiser sort of nonsense being provided for the children and the sillier sort of nonsense for the grown-up people.”

“I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all.”

“Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers, and if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to the newspapers.”

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.  This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises.  I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition.  To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.”

“My forthcoming work in five volumes, ‘The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,’ is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it.”

“Tragedy is the point when things are left to God and men can do no more.”

“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.  Laughter means self-abandonment and humility.  It is the power of uproarious reaction against ourselves and our own incongruities.  It is the one indestructible brotherhood, the one undeniable social thing.”

“All men are tragic.  All men are comic.  Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat.

“There is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one’s hat.  There is an idea that it is humiliating.  It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic – eating, for instance.

“A man could, if he let rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy.  He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal.

“The same principle can be applied to every other domestic worry.  A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated.  Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose.”

“A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke.  Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.”

“If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a sense of humour it would find itself automatically fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount.”

“The mass of men have been forced to be happy about the little things, but sad about the big ones.  But man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.  Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”

“All through history, there have been broad conceptions of the aims of life, tests of morality which masses of men have held and applied with certainty; but in the modern world these various systems have been abandoned and what is left of them is nothing but debris – a collection of broken bits, the ruins of past philosophies.  There are some, like myself, who hold a mystical philosophy, a belief that behind human experience there are realities, powers of good evil, and the final test for things is their influence for good or evil.  The good power intends us to be happy and we are justified in being happy, but the real question is not whether we are happy, but whether, behind the things wherein we seek our happiness lies the power of good.”

“He who has gone back to the beginning, and seen everything as quaint and new, will always see things in their right order, the one depending on the other in degree of purpose and importance: the poker for the fire and the fire for the man and the man for the glory of God.”

“Only where death and eternity are intensely present can human beings fully feel their fellowship.”

“Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting?  It is a noise that does a man good – a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ.  It might be the voice of the Earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep.  This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of Nature.  She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn, and as happy as a child.  The objects of Earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity.  The tree above my head is flapping some gigantic bird standing on one leg.  And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing forever.”

“If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against pride.  The more I see of existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.”

“Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices.”

“We all know that there is a thing called egoism that is much deeper than egotism.  Of all spiritual diseases it is the most intangible and the most intolerable.  It sometimes looks as if it were allied to diabolic possession.  It is that condition in which the victim does a thousand varying things from one unvarying motive of a devouring vanity; and sulks or smiles, slanders or praises, conspires and intrigues or sits still and does nothing, all in one unsleeping vigilance over the social effect of one single person.  It is amazing to me that in the modern world, these moderns really have so very little to say about the cause and cure of a moral condition that poisons nearly every family and every circle of friends.  The wickedest work in this world is symbolized not by a wine glass but by a looking-glass; it is done in a house of mirrors.”

“When we rebuke a man for being a sinner, we imply that he has the power of a saint.”

“The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place.” 

“Just as Christianity looked for the honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside the fool.  It encouraged the fool to be wise.”

“If democracy has disappointed you, do not think of it as a burst bubble, but as a broken heart, an old love affair.” 

“In every historical event, I feel the thrill of uncertainty and the suspense of human choice.” 

“The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’ over the gates of the lower world.  The emancipated poets of today have written it over the gates of this world . . . If, then, you are a pessimist, forego for a little the pleasures of pessimism.  Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green.  Unlearn that sinister learning that you think so clear; deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know.  Surrender the very flower of your culture; give up the very jewel of your pride; abandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.”

“The modern mind is a door with no house to it; a gigantic gate to nowhere.  The modern mind wishes to do away with such quaint ideas as right and wrong.” 

“There are some who would argue that we should have no absolutes.  But our need for rules does not arise from the smallness of our intellects, but from the greatness of our task.  We cannot be vague about what we believe in, what we are willing to fight for, and to die for.”

“We are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated.  But the mediaeval idea of a saint or prophet was something quite different.  The mediaeval saint or prophet was something quite different.  The mediaeval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated.”

“Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out.  It is often a great bore.  But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and thought has not been thought out.”

“A man does test everything by something.  The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.”

“Right is right, even if nobody does it.  Wrong is wrong, even if everybody does it.”

“Fairy tales are the only true accounts that man has ever given of his destiny.

“‘Jack the Giant-Killer’ is the embodiment of the paradox of courage; the paradox which says, ‘You must defy the thing that is terrifying; unless you are frightened you are not brave.’

“‘Cinderella’ is the embodiment of the paradox of humility, which says, ‘Look for the best in the thing, ignorant of its merit.’

“And ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is the embodiment of the paradox of faith – the absolutely necessary and wildly unreasonable maxim which says to every mother with a child or to every patriot with a country, ‘You must love the thing first and make it lovable afterwards.’”