Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Soul

• The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Sunset, Eye, Heart

• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Graduation

• The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspirational, New Year, Eye

• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Happiness, Men, Two

• Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Jesus, Reality

• Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Time, Inspiration, Live Life

• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

• Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Running, Men, Thinking

• the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspiring, New Year, Inspiration

• Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dream, Men, Thinking

• The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dog, Drinking, Men

• Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Grief, Men, Joy

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

• What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Hands, People

• What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christmas, Business, Turkeys

• What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Choices, Soul, Morality

• Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Friendship, Men, Soul

• Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Grief, Holiday

  "Orthodoxy". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

• I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Character, People

• IF we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Hero, Thinking

• Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stars, Taken, Tired

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.145, Simon and Schuster

• All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Soul, Damnation, States

• For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Point Break, Soul

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.104, Simon and Schuster

• You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Blue, Law

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.281, Simon and Schuster

• We can’t turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Soul, Pleasure, Worthy

• It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Faith, Stars, Real

  "All Things Considered". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1908.

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