Gilbert K. Chesterton Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Gilbert K. Chesterton Motivational Quotations: 

• “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

•  “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

•  “Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”

•  “And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.”

•  “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”

•  “One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”

•  “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”

•  “The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”

•  “A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.”

•  “New roads; new ruts.”

•  “The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

•  “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

•  “If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.”

•  “Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”

•  “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

•  “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

•  “All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

•  “Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.”

•  “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”

•  “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”

•  “An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”

•  “Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.”

•  “I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.”

•  “Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”

•  “Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”

•  “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

•  “To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

•  “The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

•  “Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.”

•  “'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.'”

•  “Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.”

  

•  “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.”

•  “How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”

•  “A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”

•  “What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.”

•  “Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.”

•  “Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”

•  “The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.”

•  “What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.”

•  “Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.”

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

•  “The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.”

•  “A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.”

•  “Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.”

•  “The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”

•  “Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.”

•  “The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.”

•  “The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.”

•  “A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.”

•  “Half a truth is better than no politics.”

•  “The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

•  “It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.”

•  “Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.”

•  “With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.”

•  “It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.”

•  “With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.”

•  “Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.”

•  “The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

•  “Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.”

•  “The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.”

•  “A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.”

•  “Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.”

•  “There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.”

•  “The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”

•  “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

•  “The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.”

•  “Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.”

•  “There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.”

•  “I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.”

•  “Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.”

•  “Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.”

•  “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

•  “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.”

•  “Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.”

•  “Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.”

•  “White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

•  “When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.”

•  “The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.”

•  “We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.”

•  “A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.”

•  “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

•  “The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”

•  “We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.”

•  “No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”

•  “The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.”

•  “A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

•  “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”

•  “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

•  “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.”

•  “The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.”

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

•  “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.”

•  “There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.”

•  “Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.”

•  “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

•  “The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.”

• “Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

•  “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

•  “I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”

•  “There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.”