G. K. Chesterton: Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. (from 'The Man Who Was Thursday', 1908)
G.K. Chesterton: The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.
G. K. Chesterton: Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.
G. K. Chesterton: Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
G.K. Chesterton: When Mr H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere) 'All chairs are quite different', he utters not merely a mis-statement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them 'all chairs'.
G. K. Chesterton: Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.
G. K. Chesterton: Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.
G.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.
George Bernard Shaw coined the name 'Chesterbelloc' for the literary partnership between G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Chesterton was opposed to both socialism and capitalism. Instead, he promoted 'distributism', which was chiefly about the widespread ownership of property.
The director Ingmar Bergman staged a production of Chesterton's play Magic in Swedish. He later turned it into his movie The Magician (1958).
Chesterton had a brother called Cecil who was killed in the first world war.
He became a Roman Catholic at the age of 47.
Chesterton was a critic, journalist, historian, theologian, editor and mystery writer. He wrote more than eighty books, around two hundred short stories, four thousand essays and one stage play, plus articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica - not forgetting his poetry.
Chesterton was a very big man. His height was 6 feet 4 inches, and he generally weighed over 21 stone (134 kg or 294 lb).
He once sent a telegram to his wife reading "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" She replied, "Home".
He was born in Campden Hill, Kensington, London, and died at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where he is buried.
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