Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Science

• Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lying, Science, Math

  Orthodoxy ch. 2 (1908)

• The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Health, Science, Always Trying

• I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Fall, Mean

• The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Science, Talking

• I despise Birth-Control first because it is ... an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Science, Doctors

• Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Real, Science

• Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Law, America

• Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Food, Science, Important

• Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand."

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Distance, Science

• The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Technology, Firsts

  "Charles Dickens". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1906.

• I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Spiritual, Dog

• The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Interesting, Decision

• Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Errors, Long

  1905 Heretics, ch.13.

• Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Attitude, Learning, Mean

• Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways. ... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Cutting, Science, Doubt

• To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Death, Philosophy, Science

• [There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Science, Men

• There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Enemy, Events

  "The Flying Inn". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1914.

• Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Men, Water

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

• "The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Long, History

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