Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

… too much of a talker to be a deep thinker

Trump has words, but there's not really any depth there.

I don't read enough books, so I guess I'm pretty shallow. I'm a lot into the physical. With me, first attraction is never intellectual.

His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation.

Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

I would hope that nothing that I write would ever seem earnest because I subscribe absolutely to Franz Nietzsche's claim when he says, "Ah, earnestness, the sure sign of a slow mind." Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

Let those find fault whose wit's so very small, They've need to show that they can think at all; Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below. Fops may have leave to level all they can; As pigmies would be glad to lop a man. Half-wits are fleas; so little and so light, We scarce could know they live, but that they bite.

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable.

Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things, when they are shown their form or told their use.

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be.

Too much gravity argues a shallow mind.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

The supreme vice is shallowness.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

-But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.

The saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying.