Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotes
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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
