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Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
Biographer
Crime Writer
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Historian
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Literature
Reading
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Writing
Necessity
Luxury
Fiction
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
I am myself so exceedingly Nordic, as far as physical constitution is concerned, that I can enjoy almost any weather except what is called glorious weather. At the end of a few days, I am left wondering how the men of the Mediterranean ever managed to do almost all the most active and astonishing things that have been done.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Man is always something worse or something better than an animal and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Science boasts of the distance of its stars of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is At Hand.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We are always giving foreign names to very native things. If there is a thing that reeks of the glorious tradition of the old English tavern, it is toasted cheese. But for some wild reason we call it Welsh rarebit. I believe that what we call Irish stew might more properly be called English stew, and that it is not particularly familiar in Ireland.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
