top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Is dishwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Observation quotes
"Good God. Men everywhere."
"The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place."
"At any rate I'd better be getting out of the wood, for really its coming on very dark. Do you think it's going to rain?'Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it.'No, I don't think it is,' he said: 'at least - not under here. Nohow.''But it may rain outside?''It may - if it chooses,' said Tweedledee: 'we've got no objection. Contrariwise."
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."
"I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."
"Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns."
"She's Prim's size in diameter."
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
"Flowers are so inconsistent!"
"Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music."
Explore more quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."
"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."
"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet."
"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."
"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera and grace before the play and pantomime and grace before I open a book and grace before sketching painting swimming fencing boxing walking playing dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."
"A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality."
"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life."
"The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers."
bottom of page