“A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”
G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy as header quotation on Tyler Blanski’s “My Name is Lazarus” conversion story in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“… to reassure us generally of the good intentions of the average German. Eulogies are pronounced on his good-humour and domesticity, and the warlike house-burners are praised as peaceful householders. It is, perhaps, admitted that there was something tactless in torturing the Belgians. But it is regarded as the exuberance of a young nation; and an indulgence is asked for such pastimes of Prussian officers on the principle that boys will be boys. That dark and watchful enemy, the sower of tares, is represented as having merely sown his wild oats.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 1, 1916, quoted in “The Golden Key Chain GKC on Scripture Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“Don’t put it off until tomorrow. Tomorrow there may be a law against it.”
“Don’t know who said it” quoted in “Other Suspects – III Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“Like most moderately intelligent people, I read detective stories in preference to modern novels…”
G.K. Chesterton in The American Review February 1937, reprinted in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“Art exists not only because life is too full of dreary things, but also because it is too full of delightful things. In existence delightful things rush by us so that we have no time to see them.”
G.K. Chesterton in Speaker April 22, 1905 quoted in unbylined “Art and Thought” compilation in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“Though he [Nero] came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw a statue without a head.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution in “News with Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025) [in context of the North Hertfordshire Museum announcing that it would refer to Elagabalus as she-her].
“Not that bore again.”
Queen Victoria on being told she must yet again send for the now-83-year-old William Gladstone to form yet another ministry, quoted in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“What convinces mankind of a man’s sincerity is this: that every now and then he should go with his principles and against his feelings.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 10, 1907, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)