Chesterton Quotes

“But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Such a pity that he [GK Chesterton] became a Catholic.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Religion may be defined as that which puts first things first.”
Illustrated London News, April 26, 1930”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 12: The Father Brown Stories, Volume I

“According to Chesterton, tea-drinking’ is ‘pagan’, while beer-drinking is ‘Christian’, and coffee is ‘the puritan’s opium’.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has 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. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot imagine what they do discuss; but it is quite evident that they have ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing. The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because they lead to warmth; whereas, obvious]y, we ought, even in a social sense, to seek those things specially. The warmth of the discussion is as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“For this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies in the clotted folly of Eugenics. Even if we could in the abstract breed humanity well, there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about what was considered well-bred.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity

“Informer'... means one who gives information. It means what 'journalist' ought to mean. The only difference is that the Common Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be ruined if he does.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers

“But Voltaire, even at his best, really began that modern mood that has blighted all the humanitarianism he honestly supported. He started the horrible habit of helping human beings only through pitying them, and never through respecting them. Through him the oppression of the poor became a sort of cruelty to animals, and the loss of all that mystical sense that to wrong the image of God is to insult the ambassador of a King.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“You say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

“Macaulay took it for granted that common sense required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn’t got.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

“A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes’ intelligent talk is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create; for he is making an outline and a shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But their subconscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins had and ordinary Angelicans had not: the exalted excitement of consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not a Dissenter. [...] It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast-day he must have a fast-day too. Otherwise, all days out to be alike; and this was the very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

“We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense that they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an eternal protest against the vulgarity of utilitarianism.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“To lose the sense of repugnance from one thing, or regard for another, is exactly so far as it goes to relapse into the vegetation or to return to the dust.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“Rituals and festivals, like those of a great national or international wedding-day, contain a thousand things to remind us that our countrymen inherit an experience much more lively and complex than any such local and temporary solution; and warn us against allowing the present to become more narrow than the past.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deadly surprise that I was quite right.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Chesterton's plain statement is like one of his paradoxes without the simplicity: but that's a paradox in itself. It's an area that the dear, bibulous, chortling old boy gets you into. He invited being patronized, but it was a stratagem. He was serious, always. He just didn't seem to be.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“...boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus, children will always play on the edge of anything. ... For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the beginning of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Sólo el ignorante en cosas de la razón puede creer que se razone sin sólidos e indisputables primeros principios.”
― G.K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown (Literatura universal)

“Si usted sabe lo que va a hacer un hombre, adelántesele. Pero si usted quiere descubrir lo que hace, vaya detrás de él.”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“La razón y la justicia imperan hasta en la estrella más solitaria y más remota... ...Pero no se imagine usted que esta astronomía frenética puede afectar a los principios de la razón y de la justicia. En llanuras de ópalo, como en escolleros de perlas, siempre se encontrará usted con la sentencia: "no robarás".”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“Un socialista es un hombre que desea que todas las chimeneas sean deshollinadas, y todos los deshollinadores recompensados por su trabajo.
-Perp - completó el sacerdote en voz baja- que no le consiente a uno ser dueño siquiera de su propio hollín.”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“Un socialista es un hombre que desea que todas las chimeneas sean deshollinadas, y todos los deshollinadores recompensados por su trabajo.
-Pero- completó el sacerdote en voz baja- que no le consiente a uno ser dueño siquiera de su propio hollín.”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“Usted dice que es extraño y yo digo que es extraño, pero ambos queremos decir cosas opuestas. La mente moderna confunde siempre dos ideas diferentes: misterio, en el sentido de lo maravilloso, y misterio, en el sentido de lo complicado. En materia de milagros, esta confusión es la mitad del problema. Un milagro es admirable, pero simple. Simple por lo mismo que es un milagro. Es la revelación de un poder que dimana directamente de Dios (o del diablo) en vez de proceder indirectamente a través de la naturaleza o la voluntad humana. Aquí, usted dice que este caso es maravilloso porque es milagroso, porque es una brujería obrada por ese indio malvado. Entiéndame usted bien: yo no niego que sea un hecho espiritual o diabólico. Sólo el cielo y el infierno conocen las extrañas influencias que determinan los pecados humanos. Pero lo que yo digo es esto: si, como usted lo supone, es un caso de magia, claro es que será maravilloso, pero no será misterioso, es decir, no será complicado. La calidad del milagro es misteriosa, pero su procedimiento es simple. Y he aquí que, a mi modo de ver, el procedimiento de este asunto ha sido todo lo contrario de lo simple.”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“A veces hace uno bien con el simple hecho de ser la única persona buena en un mal sitio.”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“Salvo los pobres, muy pocos conservan las tradiciones. Los aristócratas no viven de tradiciones, sino de modas.”
― G. K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown

“La humildad es madre de los gigantes. Desde el valle se aprecian muy bien las eminencias y las cosas grandes. Desde la cumbre se ven las cosas minúsculas.”
― G.K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown (Literatura universal)

“Si alguna vez me hubiera yo atrevido a matar a alguien -añadió con sencillez- hubiera sido a un optimista.
- ¿Cómo? -exclamó Merton, risueño-.
¿A usted le parece que la alegría de uno es desagradable a los demás?
- A la gente le agrada la risa frecuente -contestó el padre Brown-; pero no creo que le agrade la sonrisa perenne. La alegría sin humorismo es cosa muy cansada.”
― G.K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown (Literatura universal)

“Ni la más sangrienta equivocación envenena la vida tanto como un pecado.”
― G.K. Chesterton, El candor del padre Brown (Literatura universal)