Gilbert K. Chesterton World Quotations

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable one. The trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap... When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know they are dogmas.

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.

ONCE remove the old arena of theological quarrels, and you will throw open the whole world to the most horrible, the most hopeless, the most endless, the most truly interminable quarrels; the untheological quarrels.

Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

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.

It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.

If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world... The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.

If the world grows to worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows to worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldlyness by the world.

In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,

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.

My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.

if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.

somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical...It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry...the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.

To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world.

Shouldn't atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?

We must be fond of the world, even in order to change it.

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.