Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

As long as a man is alive and out of hell, he cannot have any cause to complain.

There's a billboard in a little farm town in the Midwest that says: IF YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT FARMERS, DON'T TALK WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.

Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

There various news I heard of love and strife,Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,The fall of favourites, projects of the great,Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.

I have the choice to be angry at God for what i don't have, or be thankful for what i do have

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence neither speed up nor slow down add to nor diminish it is an imponderably valuable gift.

You know being born is important to you. You know nothing else was ever so important to you.

I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things considered, I can't complain.

If we complained less, and praised more, we should be happier, and God would be more glorified.

I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up.

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.

[Sex] is something big and cosmic. What else do we have? There's only birth and death and the union of two people - and sex is the only one that happens to us more than once.

Don't complain about what you don't have. Use what you've got. To do less than your best is a sin. Every single one of us has the power for greatness, because greatness is determined by service-to yourself and to others.

Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)

Pray when you feel like worrying. Give thanks when you feel like complaining. Keep going when you feel like quitting.

There is no fortune so good that you can find nothing in it to complain of.

Life was such a strange thing, so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost- and those who lost it could never tell you what it was like, could they?

This law of monogamy, or the monogamic system, laid the foundation for prostitution and the evils and diseases of the most revolting nature and character under which modern Christendom groans.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

I wouldn't mind removing all the mistakes I have made. That would be exhausting and take forever. Honestly, it's one of the spells of my life that has been the most perfect. Not because I did the job perfectly, because of course I did it very imperfectly, but because I enjoyed it so much. What would I change? I complain a lot. I whinge, I more or less communicate in levels of complaint so I wish sometimes I didn't just spend all my time saying, 'I'm working so hard, what do I get in return for this?'.

If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.