Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I am a believer in discipline; it takes a lot to do well. You need discipline for those little excursions into the chaotic that make life interesting.

There's been nothing but discipline, discipline, discipline all my life.

This I consider to be a valuable principle in life: Do no thing in excess.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

The fact is, I diet every day of my life. I have to work at it. But I diet so I can pig out.

I hold this as a rule of life: too much of anything is bad.

A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation.

I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do.

Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends.

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much.

You shall abstain, shall abstain. That is the eternal song.

It is not necessary to move mountains in order to prove one's faith.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

My father taught me that only through self-discipline can you achieve freedom. Pour water in a cup and you can drink; without the cup, the water would splash all over. The cup is discipline.

Self-control is only courage under another form.

The old proverb, applied to fire and water, may with equal truth be applied to the imagination - it is a good servant, but a bad master.

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

I have to rein myself in sometimes.

Restraint never ruins one's health.

Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Whoever heard a man of fortune in England talk of the necessaries of life? . . . Whether we can afford it or no, we must have superfluities.

I enjoy winning and very much dislike losing- but I did not allow either of them to obsess me. I was a silent loser, believing that if you won you said little, and if you lost you said even less