Quotes by G. K. Chesterton

• Wikipedia entry
• Author video
• Related authors: Intellectuals Writers Essayists

A yawn is a silent shout.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully interferes.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

"My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober."
    --G. K. Chesterton 

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

The only defensible war is a war of defense.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over...is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

Coincidences are spiritual puns.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
    --G. K. Chesterton 

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
    --G. K. Chesterton