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The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
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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.
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It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
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Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.
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The test of happiness is gratitude.
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A man cannot deserve adventures he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
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Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.
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The strangest whim has seized me ... After all I think I will not hang myself today.
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Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.
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...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
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The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
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A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
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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. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
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An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.
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Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.
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The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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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.
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Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
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Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton