Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Tremendous Trifles
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
G. K. CHESTERTON, What I Saw in America
Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Quotable Chesterton: A Topical Compilation of the Wit, Wisdom and Satire of G.K. Chesterton
Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Alarms and Discursions
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G. K. CHESTERTON, What I Saw in America
The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics
There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Flying Inn
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G. K. CHESTERTON, "The Ethics of Elfland", Orthodoxy
The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Five Types: A Book of Essays
If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the unreformed institutions.
G. K. CHESTERTON, All Is Grist: A Book of Essays
Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Everlasting Man
A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Outline of Sanity
The education of the Parisian child is something corresponding to the clear avenues and the exact squares of Paris. When the Parisian boy has done learning about the French reason and the Roman order he can go out and see the thing repeated in the shapes of many shining public spaces, in the angles of the many streets.
G. K. CHESTERTON, All Things Considered
Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Wisdom of Father Brown
They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
G. K. CHESTERTON, The Coloured Lands
The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough.
G. K. CHESTERTON, What's Wrong with the World
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
G. K. CHESTERTON, attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
The family is ... like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy.
G. K. CHESTERTON, Heretics
The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
G. K. CHESTERTON, What's Wrong with the World
We ... are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.
