Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

To a certain extent all philosophers have been involved in a systematic questioning that undermines confidence and certainty. Philosophy as a whole unleashed skeptical forces which, outside of the tightly controlled environment of a rigorous philosophical debate, led a lot of people to throw their hands up in despair and think 'what's the point?'. A lot of the public perception of philosophy is that it leaves you with no answers, and more confused than you were at the beginning.

The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.

Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.

We cannot begin with complete doubt.

From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.

I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing. . . . I do not understand it. . . . Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is . . . , which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

...skepticism can never provide firm ground under a man's feet. And perhaps, after all, we need firm ground.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

All are sure in their days except the most wise ... He is the wisest philosopher who holds his theory with some doubt.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

...I will not allow books to prove any thing." "But how shall we prove any thing?" "We never shall.

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith