Quotes from G. K. Chesterton

The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right.

No man knows he is young while he is young.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

The man who sees consistency in things is a wit; the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

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

In the majority of sane human lives there is no problem of sex at all; there is no problem of marriage at all; there is no problem of temperament at all; for all these problems are dwarfed and rendered ridiculous by the standing problem of being a moderately honest man and paying the butcher.

Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.

And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,"I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

To an open house in the eveningHome shall men come,To an older place than EdenAnd a taller town than Rome.

...Tea, although an Oriental, Is a gentleman at least; Cocoa is a cad and coward, Cocoa is a vulgar beast...

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.