If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

G. K. CHESTERTON, What's Wrong with the World

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy

Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are — of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.

G. K. CHESTERTON, "A Defence of Humilities," The Defendant

When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Illustrated London News, Apr. 6, 1918

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. CHESTERTON, attributed, The Pleasure Instinct

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. 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.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

G. K. CHESTERTON, The Everlasting Man

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Alarms and Discursions

If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful.

G. K. CHESTERTON, The Man Who Was Thursday

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

G. K. CHESTERTON, "The Red Angel," Tremendous Trifles

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

G. K. CHESTERTON, "Spiritualism," All Things Considered

If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy

Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction ... for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.

G. K. CHESTERTON, The Club of Queer Trades

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

G. K. CHESTERTON, The Cleveland Press, Mar. 1, 1921

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.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Twelve Types

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

G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy

Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics

The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree.

G. K. CHESTERTON, "A Defence of Baby-Worship," The Defendant

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

G. K. CHESTERTON, attributed, G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio

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.

G. K. CHESTERTON, A Miscellany of Men

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

G. K. CHESTERTON, Illustrated London News, Oct. 23, 1909

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Twelve Types

Tyranny over a man is not tyranny: it is rebellion, for man is royal.

G. K. CHESTERTON, "Charles Dickens"

The only simplicity that matters is the simplicity of the heart. If that be gone, it can be brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing; but only by tears and terror and the fires that are not quenched.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics

Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

G. K. CHESTERTON, The Man Who Was Thursday

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise.

G. K. CHESTERTON, The Outline of Sanity

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

G. K. CHESTERTON, Alarms and Discursions

It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

G. K. CHESTERTON, What's Wrong with the World

Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

G. K. CHESTERTON, All Things Considered

Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth. But it is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.

G. K. CHESTERTON, Appreciations of Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens