Gilbert K. Chesterton Men Quotations

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

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.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

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.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

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.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

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.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

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.

The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.

Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.' My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

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.

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

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.

Only poor men get hanged.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.

You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .

Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.

There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong... A stiff apology is a second insult.

THERE are no wise few; for in all men rages the folly of the Fall. Take your strongest, happiest, handsomest, best born, best bred, best instructed men on earth and give them special power for half an hour and because they are men they will begin to [perform] badly ...

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.

Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.

There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

Men rush toward complexity; but yearn for simplicity.

No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be...

Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.

Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.

If man is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust.

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than any one else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes been objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars.

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.

In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.

And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

No man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.

But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

Mr. Blatchford says that there was not a Fall but a gradual rise. But the very word "rise" implies that you know toward what you are rising. Unless there is a standard you cannot tell whether you are rising or falling. But the main point is that the Fall like every other large path of Christianity is embodied in the common language talked on the top of an omnibus. Anybody might say, "Very few men are really Manly." Nobody would say, "Very few whales are really whaley."

A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

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.

Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.