Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings but they dream of being shepherds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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.
Dream
Trying
Yearn
Men
Shepherds
Rush
Complexity
Simplicity
Towards
Kings
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex they can breed thoughts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A naked moon stood in a naked sky.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.
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
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
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
He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Fairy tales are more than true.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
