There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
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 a definite end.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
Gilbert K. Chesterton

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton