Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.

It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is to enjoy a good concert. But I do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.

He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.

Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God

In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

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

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.