Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

—G. K. Chesterton

love virtue unlovable

About G. K. Chesterton

Portrait of G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English journalist, novelist, essayist, poet, and Christian apologist. Chesterton's wit, paradoxical style, and defence of tradition made him a dominant figure in early 20th-century literature.

More quotations from G. K. Chesterton

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

—G. K. Chesterton

A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

—G. K. Chesterton

women men hats chase

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G. K. Chesterton

politics poverty government wealth rich people

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

—G. K. Chesterton

power right morality language

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

—G. K. Chesterton

More quotations tagged with “virtue”

However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.

—Robertson Davies

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If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.

—Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

love virtue fault

It is the virtue and the pathos of man that he aspires endlessly toward a better world; it is his weakness and his tragedy that he does nothing to bring such a world even one step nearer.

—Ludwig Lewisohn

virtue weakness world tragedy pathos

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

friendship friends virtue

If you can look at yourself without condemning what you see, without comparing yourself with somebody else, without wishing to be more beautiful or more virtuous; if you can just observe what you are and move with it, then you will find that it is possible to go infinitely far. Then there is no end to the journey, and that is the mystery, the beauty of it.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things

others virtue beauty self mystery self-image journey comparing

History

8 Dec 2014 Added
14 Jul 2015 Edited (details weren’t recorded yet)