Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

English Journalist, Humorist, Essayist, Novelist and Poet

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read."

"There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell."

"Tradition does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive."

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

"Truth turn into dogma the moment they are disputed."

"We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead, in the perfectly definite sense it is not alive."

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. "

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up. "

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. "

"In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own? "

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong."

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. "

"If there were no God, there would be no Atheists. "

"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper. "

"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. "

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors. And also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people. "

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. "

"The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all. "

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

"A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet."

"Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed."

"For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million."

"A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle."

"A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky."

"A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation."

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

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, Do it again; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, Do it again to the sun; and every evening, Do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

"A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter."

"A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon."

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

"A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive."

"A dying monarchy is always one that has too much power, not too little; a dying religion always interferes more than it ought, not less."

"A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind."

"A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement."

"A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realizes, in a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humor is generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke."

"A good man’s work is affected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is."

"A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbor’s landmark."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy."

"A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education."

"A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.'"

"A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence."

"A liberated woman is one who rises up and says to her menfolk, 'I will not be dictated to,' and proceeds to become a stenographer."

"A Litigious Society - The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end."

"A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy."

"A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything"

"A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it."

"A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle."

"A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying."