Gilbert K. Chesterton Sun Quotations

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.

There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.