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“But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. 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. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Such a pity that he [GK Chesterton] became a Catholic.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“It may be incredible that one creed is the truth and the others are relatively false. At the same time, it is not only incredible, but intolerable, to believe that there is no truth in or out of the creeds, and all are equally false. For then nobody can ever set anything right, if everybody is equally wrong.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“According to Chesterton, tea-drinking�� is ‘pagan��, while beer-drinking is ‘Christian��, and coffee is ‘the puritan’s opium��.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Jūs man patīkat. No tā izriet sekojošais: es justos apbēdināts apmēram divarpus minūtes, ja man nāktos dzirdēt, ka esat miris mokpilnā nāvē.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert �� himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt �� the Divine Reason”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Religion may be defined as that which puts first things first.��
Illustrated London News, April 26, 1930”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 12: The Father Brown Stories, Volume I

“Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant.”
― Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton

“A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticize it as if he comprehended it.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The purpose of an open mind, [Chesterton] said, is like the purpose of an open mouth: that it might be shut again on something solid. Yes, we must be free to ask questions. But when we hear a good answer we must be prepared to recognize it as such, and not be so keen on keeping all the questions open that we shy away from an answer because we so like having an open mind. That is the way to intellectual, as well as spiritual, starvation.”
― N.T. Wright, For All God's Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church

“Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce

“As Chesterton once put it unkindly, ‘Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe anything.”
― Charles Krauthammer, The Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors

“I have heard that in some debating clubs there is a rule that the members may discuss anything except religion and politics. I cannot imagine what they do discuss; but it is quite evident that they have ruled out the only two subjects which are either important or amusing. The thing is a part of a certain modern tendency to avoid things because they lead to warmth; whereas, obvious]y, we ought, even in a social sense, to seek those things specially. The warmth of the discussion is as much a part of hospitality as the warmth of the fire.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“For this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies in the clotted folly of Eugenics. Even if we could in the abstract breed humanity well, there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about what was considered well-bred.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity

“Informer'... means one who gives information. It means what 'journalist' ought to mean. The only difference is that the Common Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be ruined if he does.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers

“Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“It is a southern river town with some pretensions of being a city... And like every southern river town it has its canker....
The capital has its own orneriness, as pervading as the others, but it isn't the same sort. It never was a fun town. It is not a robust sin town. Its fleshpots have no real juice in them. Its vices are effete and heterodox, and its moral rot is a dry one. Though its people have come from all parts, yet they are not all sorts of people. They are very much of one sort. The ethic climate here nurtures an ancient, evil, shriveled thing. It is of the inhabitants of this city that the prophet spoke:
Of those who do not have the faith
And will not have the fun.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

“Men will more and more realize that there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything; there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a center of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“As I read and reread all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley..., a slow and awful impression gradually and graphically grew upon my mind - the impression that Christianity must be an extraordinary thing. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“Chesterton's topic is nothing less than the fundamental contrast between deductive logic, true of all possible worlds, and inductive logic, capable only of telling us how we may reasonably expect this world to behave. Let us hasten to add that Chesterton's analysis is in full agreement with the views of modern logicians. Perhaps his "test of the imagination" is not strictly accurate--who can "imagine" the four-dimensional constructions of relativity?-but in essence his position is unassailable. Logical and mathematical statements are true by definition. They are "empty tautologies," to use a current phrase, like the impressive maxim that there are always six eggs in half a dozen. Nature, on the other hand, is under no similar constraints. Fortunately, her "weird repetitions," as GK calls them, often conform to surprisingly low-order equations. But as Hume and others before Hume made clear, there is no logical reason why she should behave so politely.”
― Martin Gardner, Great Essays in Science

“You say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

“Macaulay took it for granted that common sense required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn’t got.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

“A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes�� intelligent talk is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create; for he is making an outline and a shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But their subconscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins had and ordinary Angelicans had not: the exalted excitement of consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not a Dissenter. [...] It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast-day he must have a fast-day too. Otherwise, all days out to be alike; and this was the very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature

“We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense that they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an eternal protest against the vulgarity of utilitarianism.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“But Voltaire, even at his best, really began that modern mood that has blighted all the humanitarianism he honestly supported. He started the horrible habit of helping human beings only through pitying them, and never through respecting them. Through him the oppression of the poor became a sort of cruelty to animals, and the loss of all that mystical sense that to wrong the image of God is to insult the ambassador of a King.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“To lose the sense of repugnance from one thing, or regard for another, is exactly so far as it goes to relapse into the vegetation or to return to the dust.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“Rituals and festivals, like those of a great national or international wedding-day, contain a thousand things to remind us that our countrymen inherit an experience much more lively and complex than any such local and temporary solution; and warn us against allowing the present to become more narrow than the past.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deadly surprise that I was quite right.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“Chesterton's plain statement is like one of his paradoxes without the simplicity: but that's a paradox in itself. It's an area that the dear, bibulous, chortling old boy gets you into. He invited being patronized, but it was a stratagem. He was serious, always. He just didn't seem to be.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“...boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus, children will always play on the edge of anything. ... For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the beginning of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton