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All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.


Gilbert K. Chesterton

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All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
G. K. CHESTERTON All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
G. K. CHESTERTON Science is all metaphor.
TIMOTHY LEARY All that is transitory is but a metaphor.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
WALTER MOSLEY Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
WALTER MOSLEY All's well that carries on well
AMIT ABRAHAM All of the experiences are a metaphor for what's happening in your life. You have to unravel the met...
SUSAN DE WARDT If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of ...
OCTAVIO PAZ Language is memory and metaphor.
STORM JAMESON Language is memory and metaphor
STORM JAMESON unless you're the lead dog the view never changes...

mercy out does justice every time: BOB MITCHLEY Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one w...
OSIP MANDELSTAM Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnec...
JOHN BERGER The Negro is America's metaphor,
RICHARD WRIGHT All power is within you; you can do anything and everything. Believe in that, do not believe that yo...
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA Slang is a poor man's poetry
JOHN MOORE God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as th...
JOSEPH CAMPBELL Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways...
TWYLA THARP God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple a...
JOSEPH CAMPBELL Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY Branson is a metaphor for red state America,
ROBERT SCHMUHL Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
JOHN RALSTON SAUL Who you really are is Nonphysical Energy focused is a physical body, knowing full well that all is w...
ABRAHAM HICKS Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.
JAMES GEARY The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.
G. K. CHESTERTON The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality...
SAID NURSI I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled wit...
DAVID BYRNE Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three varieties - geography, autobiography, and metaphor. ...
ROBERT ADAMS Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
WALLACE STEVENS There's a metaphor in that somewhere—like all of life is about ending up somewhere you didn't expe...
LAUREN OLIVER Sun shines on my back as I walk away
Sun shines on my chest and I return
The fall air is c...
BRENT M. JONES Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when...
MILAN KUNDERA The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our c...
AHARON APPELFELD I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousan...
JOHN GREEN Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue
ANNE LAMOTT I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one bad...
JANDY NELSON They should have told him that [the fence he fell through on a campaign stop] was not a metaphor. He...
BOB DOLE There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.
MARY CATHERINE BATESON This is a very powerful tool, potentially with a bidirectional metaphor. It's indexing all this stuf...
JAMES GOVERNOR You know me. Hostility makes me shrink up like a... [pauses] I can't think of a non-sexual metaphor.
DR. GREGORY HOUSE An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor
ROBERT FROST These incidents become viewed through the lens of metaphor. And Dan Rather represents not just CBS, ...
MARK FELDSTEIN There is a similarity, if I may be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of...
STEVEN BRUST The metaphor is that we're filling someone's bowl - and stomach - with the funds gathered from this ...
ELLEN MORRIS Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in deligh...
ELIZABETH GILBERT The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt f...
ARISTOTLE Love. Do you feel it? It encircles you in its embrace of simplicity. Moment by moment love is there ...
COLLEEN LAUKKA An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.
ROBERT FROST The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path.
LARRY DOSSEY The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.
TAYLOR HACKFORD The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.
ARISTOTLE Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.
JAMES GEARY Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.
JAMES GEARY A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
G. C. (GEORG CHRISTOPH) LICHTENBERG A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG The metaphor is the skeleton key to unlock the mind of any student.
GRANT FAIRLEY To use an unfortunate metaphor, Iraq is a roadside bomb in American politics.
RICH BOND My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a ...
STEPHEN DOBYNS I realized that food was actually a metaphor for bringing us all together. It's about us communi...
GEORGE TILLMAN, JR. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS The river is a metaphor for life in general, ... all the bullshit that you deal with from being a ki...
ZAKK WYLDE Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing ...
ROBERT REDFORD Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.
RACHEL HARTMAN J. M. Barrie founded a celebrity cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome...
JOHN LLOYD Hiding in all the thorns, there is a yellow rose.
BEN OAK A world ends when its metaphor has died
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH A single metaphor can give birth to love.
MILAN KUNDERA We planned for weeks and weeks on this. If you want to use a sports metaphor, you'd say we left it a...
STEVE MARKS Being present is being connected to All Things.
S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. Most Hollywood boxing movies are metaphors. Your movie is not a metaphor. It's really about boxing.
WALTER HILL ...both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when...
ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK What's in the cup stays in the cup until the owner decides to gulp it down.
LEAH DANCEL Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.
SARAH BLAKE Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a
red flag to a bu... ...
TERRY PRATCHETT the road is life
JACK KEROUAC The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island, isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got int...
JARED DIAMOND For me, in a very general way it has just become this metaphor for an open-ended, spiritual journey....
JERRY UELSMANN The shoes are a metaphor for these two women who have the kind of dynamic that a lot of women have w...
SOPHIE DE RAKOFF CARBONELL I think that's what makes [the show] a cut above - the writing of a metaphor, the writing about a fa...
JAKE WEBER It's a metaphor for our culture. This is where we get a lot of images we use in popular culture.
THE WIZARD OF OZ I think that's what makes (the show) a cut above — the writing of a metaphor, the writing about a ...
JAKE WEBER You cannot polish a jem without friction
HELENA JEAN Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bull, was l...
TERRY PRATCHETT It's not so much Katrina as a phenomenon as it's Katrina as a metaphor for what our society has beco...
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?"
"No, Julius. It's the end of the ci...
EOIN COLFER Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and l...
JOSEPH FORT NEWTON Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
H.L. MENCKEN I am not plain, or average or - God forbid - vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolore...
WENDY MASS I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.
ISAAC MARION ...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn...
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
ZORA NEALE HURSTON We used beach access as a metaphor for this issue. People for the most part can stroll around and us...
JAMES BURKE I think that's what makes (the show) a cut above — the writing of a metaphor, the writing about a f...
JAKE WEBER It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.
ANDREI CODRESCU This must be I guess the most extreme form of unintended consequence, but it seemed to me a great me...
JOSEPH KANON Interpreting Jesus’ command to eat His flesh and drink His blood as a metaphor … is not enough, .....
JEFF CAVINS I began to see the character more as a metaphor for how a person survives and manages to maintain hi...
NEIL JORDAN

More Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Coincidences are spiritual puns.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglar...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A yawn is a silent shout.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally t...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its v...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have wo...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in orde...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry; Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON No man knows he is young while he is young.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Truths turn into dogmas the minute they are disputed.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about som...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON "My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except a desperate ca...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writer...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, a...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the mi...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a de...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rain...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of read...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness double...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gr...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wron...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son shoul...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he h...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educat...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believi...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being conte...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our g...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer b...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we per...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we lau...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Courage is almost a contradiction in terms: it means a strong desire to live taking the form of read...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Courage is almost a contradiction in terms: it means a strong desire to live taking the form of re...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, but that the dead are living.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a m...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art,...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar thing...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one'...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and do...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simp...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be intere...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an inj...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten,...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruel...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for edu...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON The simplification of anything is always sensational.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more ...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. B...
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON New roads; new ruts.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON The object of opening the mind as of opening the mouth is to close it again on something solid.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that ...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The r...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON "My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperat...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Journalism consists largely in saying 'Lord Jones died' to people who never knew Lord Jones was aliv...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for edu...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little boot...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in or...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON I realized that ritual will always mean throwing away something; Destroying our corn or wine upon t...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was bl...
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled...
G. K. CHESTERTON You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best write...
G K CHESTERTON Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separa...
G. K. CHESTERTON Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the ...
G. K. CHESTERTON Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
G. K. CHESTERTON Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long a...
G. K. CHESTERTON The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
G. K. CHESTERTON Half a truth is better than no politics.
G. K. CHESTERTON A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
G. K. CHESTERTON The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglar...
G. K. CHESTERTON We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified ...
G. K. CHESTERTON Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that...
G. K. CHESTERTON All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
G. K. CHESTERTON There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it i...
G. K. CHESTERTON I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and do...
G. K. CHESTERTON Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized.
G. K. CHESTERTON One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
G. K. CHESTERTON Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G. K. CHESTERTON I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls...
G. K. CHESTERTON Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G. K. CHESTERTON People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
G. K. CHESTERTON Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a re...
G. K. CHESTERTON Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.
G. K. CHESTERTON Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the mi...
G. K. CHESTERTON In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a p...
G. K. CHESTERTON The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untr...
G. K. CHESTERTON Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does no...
G. K. CHESTERTON If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would esca...
G. K. CHESTERTON Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world...
G. K. CHESTERTON The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitali...
G. K. CHESTERTON Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. CHESTERTON Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
G. K. CHESTERTON The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In thi...
G. K. CHESTERTON Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about som...
G. K. CHESTERTON Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher...
G. K. CHESTERTON The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for ...
G. K. CHESTERTON The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
G. K. CHESTERTON When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that n...
G. K. CHESTERTON Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
G. K. CHESTERTON There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes eve...
G. K. CHESTERTON The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristo...
G. K. CHESTERTON Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the...
G. K. CHESTERTON To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believi...
G. K. CHESTERTON Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a m...
G. K. CHESTERTON Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
G. K. CHESTERTON Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
G. K. CHESTERTON The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, beca...
G. K. CHESTERTON One may understand the Cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
G. K. CHESTERTON The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.
G. K. CHESTERTON Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important...
G. K. CHESTERTON What we call personality (...) has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featu...
G. K. CHESTERTON The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense...
G. K. CHESTERTON Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our g...
G. K. CHESTERTON The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
G. K. CHESTERTON A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has...
G. K. CHESTERTON Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
G. K. CHESTERTON Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more ...
G. K. CHESTERTON The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
G. K. CHESTERTON It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
G. K. CHESTERTON If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
G. K. CHESTERTON O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our peop...
G. K. CHESTERTON We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to ...
G. K. CHESTERTON