Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales

You have a point," said Fronto, "and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic.

It is with logic that one proves; it is with intuition that one invents.

Only through religion can logic develop into philosophy, only from this source stems that which makes philosophy more than science. And without religion we will have only novels, or the triviality today called belles lettres instead of an eternally rich and infinite poetry.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence.

The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

L'imagination m'apportait des délices infinies. En recouvrant ce que les hommes appellent la raison, faudra-t-il regretter de les avoir perdues...? My imagination gave me infinite delight. In recovering what men call reason, do I have to regret the loss of these joys?

A poet is a painter of the soul.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

One can't be of an enquiring and experimental nature, and still be very sensible.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."