Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Children

• Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Baby, Children, Dragons

  "Tremendous Trifles". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1909.

• 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

  Christmas, Gratitude, Children

• Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christmas, Summer, Children

• For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Love, Children, Justice

  "The Coloured Lands". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1938.

• As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, War, Views

• How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Motherhood, Careers

  "What's Wrong with the World". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton (Part Three: Feminism, or The Mistake About Woman, Chapter 3: The Emancipation of Domesticity), 1910.

• The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Children, Father

• The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Family, Christian, Prayer

• The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Children, Humorous

  "The Defendant". Book by G. K. Chesterton, A Defence of Baby-Worship, 1901.

• A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Hero, Fighting

• The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Education, Children, People

• ...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Humorous, Men

• If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspirational, Nature, Stars

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

• Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Two, Giving

• Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Baby, Children, Mean

• I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Moving, Butterfly

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

• The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Fear, Ideas

• ...but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lonely, Children, Real

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

• No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Tired, Hot

• When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Giving, Advice

• Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hope, Children, Dragons

• Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Sex, Children

• It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a fewgreat hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it istyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Men, Doctors

• The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspirational, Children, Growing Up

  'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' (1904) bk. 1, ch. 1

• That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Enough, Dare

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.328, Simon and Schuster

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