Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.

When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.

The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

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.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

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

Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.

No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.