Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.

There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value of any of them is that they bear the image of the king.

All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.

Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.

Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

Teach to the young, men's enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors.

To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.

It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.

Men rush toward complexity; but yearn for simplicity.

Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.