Quotes from Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste... if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.

It is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

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.

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.

The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

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.

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. . . .

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.