Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English essayist, novelist, journalist, and critic. He devoted his extraordinary intellect and creative power to the reform of the English government and society.

Chesterton was born in London. His career began when he verbalized his first story to his aunt Rose at the age of three. He experimented in the occult as a young man, returned to the Church of England, and converted to Catholicism later in life. His thoughts on religion influenced much of his writing.

Chesterton was also amazingly prolific—he wrote fast and barely edited what he wrote. He considered himself largely a journalist, and he wrote 4,000 newspaper essays; he also wrote some 80 books (covering fiction, criticism, literary biography, and theology) as well as several hundred poems, 200 short stories, and many plays. He made his points with wit and paradox, his vast body of work contains a plethora of quotable material.

Chesterton is best known for his stories about Father Brown, a crime-solving Roman Catholic priest who seems awkward and inept—he regularly misplaces his umbrella, falls asleep during police interrogations—but knows more about crime than the criminals. Chesterton got the idea from observing Catholic priests, who listen to confessions all day long but know more about degradation and corruption than do anyone else in society.

Chesterton novels include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904,) a political satire that many readers consider his most entertaining work. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908,) widely considered his best fictional work, is presented as a detective story but its surrealistic turns and unworldly characters turn it into a metaphysical thriller of Christian allegory.

Chesterton’s two greatest Christian apologetics were Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925;) the latter contributed to the British intellectual C. S. Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by G. K. Chesterton

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Thought, Reason

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Aristocracy, Democracy, Government

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Hope

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Perfection, Doing

Ritual will always mean throwing away something; destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our Gods.
—G. K. Chesterton

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Architecture

Aristocracy is an atmosphere; it is sometimes a healthy atmosphere; but it is very hard to say when it becomes an unhealthy atmosphere. You can prove that a man is not the son of a king, or that he is not the delegate of a definite number of people. But you cannot prove that a man is not a gentleman.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Class

There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only “instinct” I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as “the sin of avarice.”
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Wealth

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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Science

I would not say that old men grow wise, for men never grow wise; and many old men retain a very attractive childishness and cheerful innocence. Elderly people are often much more romantic than younger people, and sometimes even more adventurous, having begun to realize how many things they do not know.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Aging

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Religion

One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Aging

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.
—G. K. Chesterton

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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Voting

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Book, Books

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Language

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Rain, Adversity

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
—G. K. Chesterton

As a matter of fact, no man can be merry unless he is serious.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Happiness

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Art, Personality

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Desire, Courage, Live, Age, Bravery

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Poverty

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Family

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Teaching, Education, Teachers

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf ;is better than a whole loaf.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Compromise

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life in order to keep it.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Courage

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: One liners, Golf

The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do so without destroying the health of the mind.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Health

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.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Prejudice

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
—G. K. Chesterton
Topics: Perception

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