Quote

To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.

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.
Mean
Woman
Ransom
Much
Desire
Desiring
Men
Father
Nobler
Love
Money
Marry
May
Abstract
Take
Return
Country
Pleasure
Brigands
Must
Success
Distancing

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.
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Every man is important if he loses his lifeand every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.
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There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.
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Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
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The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
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The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
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The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.
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The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
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Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.
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Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
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No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
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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.
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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 grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
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How quickly revolutions grow old and, worse still, respectable.
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In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.
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Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
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Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
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When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.
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It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.
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The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton