K. Chesterton
K. Chesterton
adventure men doubt
Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
truth fiction suits
Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
creative waste dustbin
Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.
military believe army
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
suicide suicidal men
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.
kings hate men
They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.
happiness light easy
It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.
men views ignorant
A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.
government abolish
Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God.
art philosophy reality
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.
song war men
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
home gentleman dining
Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.
wife house dull
It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.
book writing past
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.