Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

A yawn is a silent shout.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.

Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

Christian Science … is the direct denial both of science and of Christianity, for Science rests wholly on the recognition of truth and Christianity on the recognition of pain.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

[Paradox is] truth standing on its head to gain attention.

If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.

In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

We actually love ourselves more than we love joy.

I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.