Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.

Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.

The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.

A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is.

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.

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.

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

When you with velvets mantled o'er, Defy December's tempests frore, Oh! spare one garment from your store, To clothe the poor at Christmas.