Gilbert K. Chesterton Ali Quotations

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

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.

I am at one with my duality.

The moderns do not realize modernity.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. They can't see the problem if they are looking in the wrong place. They can't see the problem if they have blinders on - for 'none are so blind as those that will not see'.

All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value of any of them is that they bear the image of the king.

People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.

A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

The old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.

. . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.

There are some desires that are not desirable.

What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.

Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.