Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.
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.
Well
Laugh
Summed
Men
Conflict
Criticizing
Laughing
Recent
Stage
Criticize
Modern
Favor
Culture
Favors
Wells
Criticism
Might
Smile
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The only object of liberty is life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christian Science … is the direct denial both of science and of Christianity, for Science rests wholly on the recognition of truth and Christianity on the recognition of pain.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.
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
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls but they are the walls of a playground.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!
Gilbert K. Chesterton
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
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
There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
