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We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
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.
People
Restrain
Laws
Law
Need
Needs
Good
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A man cannot deserve adventures he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.
Gilbert 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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
