Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.

Only poor men get hanged.

Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.' My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.

if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth

Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

Man is at his tallest when he bows.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.

Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know they are dogmas.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.