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Another collection of G. K. Chesterton’s sharpest one-liners offers wit, wisdom and timeless Christian insight on faith, freedom, truth and society.

I cannot get too much of the great G. K. Chesterton. So I had some fun the other day assembling 100 favourite brief quotes from the master. See that piece here.

Given that I enjoyed that little exercise so much, I found and assembled another 100 today – presented in rough alphabetical order. All are quite short, but give you a real feel for the man and his mind. Those familiar with GKC will recognise many of the ones selected here. And those unfamiliar with him might see why he is well worth reading.

Chesterton’s Timeless Wisdom

A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.

A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen.

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up.

America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

Aquinas was fighting on two fronts. His main business was to defend the Faith against the abuse of Aristotle; and he boldly did it by supporting the use of Aristotle.

As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all.

Faith, Reason and Christianity

But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty.

But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

Daybreak is a never-ending glory; getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance.

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

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

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.

For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one.

For solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.

How can it be more important to teach a child how to avoid a disease than how to value life?

I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

I do not believe that a nation dies save by suicide.

I don’t need a church to tell me I’m wrong where I already know I’m wrong; I need a Church to tell me I’m wrong where I think I’m right.

I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story, then there is a story-teller.

I would rather have disagreement with someone who loved me than to be tolerated by someone with only apathy.

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

If Christianity needs to be ‘new,’ it does not need to be Christian.

If man is not a divinity, then he is a disease. Either he is the image of God, or else he is the one animal which has gone mad.

If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.

It is just as easy to massacre men in the name of Man as to burn churches in the name of God. It is as feasible to decree inhumanity in humanitarian language as to decree sacrilege in sacred language.

It is only in establishing and obeying certain rules that freedom is possible.

It is only the fool who tries to get the heavens inside his head, and not unnaturally his head bursts. The wise man is content to get his head inside the heavens.

Freedom, Family and Society

It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State.

It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people.

It’s not that we don’t have enough scoundrels to curse; it’s that we don’t have enough good men to curse them.

Just as they became unnatural by worshipping nature, so they actually became unmanly by worshipping man.

Madmen are always serious; they go mad from lack of humour.

Man’s most pragmatic need is to be something more than a pragmatist.

Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of.

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’

Nobody supposes that the best critic of music is the man who talks coldly about music. But there is an idea that a man is a correct judge of religion because he looks down on religions.

Now I am one of those who believe that the cure for centralisation is decentralisation.

Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.

Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision; instead, we are always changing the vision.

Public education has not produced an educated public.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice, it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion.

Sometimes it’s not that you can’t see the solution. It is that you can’t see the problem.

Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.

Take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

The excuse for the last oppression will always serve as well for the next oppression; and to that tyranny, there can be no end.

The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.

The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

The modern world is madder than any satires on it.

The more truly we can see life as a fairy tale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.

The most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.

The only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break.

Truth in a Confused Age

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the answers of man.

The secularists have not wrecked divine things, but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven, but they laid waste the world.

The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.

The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.

The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the critics.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

There are some desires that are not desirable.

There are very few things in life that a little politics can’t make worse.

There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.

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

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.

To say that moderns are half-educated may be too complimentary by half.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand Truth.

Until suffering comes upon us, the explorations that consume our hearts and our communities reflect the shallowness of our lives.

We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

We make our friends, we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.

We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.

What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad, but rather that dogma is too good to be true.

When a theosophist absorbs Christianity, it is rather as a cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries.

When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven’s name, to what?

When reason would have maddened men, theology kept them sane.

When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

While the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

You can’t have the family farm without the family.

You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.