Centre d’Estudis i Documentació G. K. Chesterton

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men, 1912

“They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.”
― G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, 1908

“Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

“A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.”
― G.K. Chesterton, William Blake, 1910

“There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 1906

“Private lives are more important than public reputations.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911

“The secret of life lies in laughter and humility.”― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910

“Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason…that is its reason for existing.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, 1910

“The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, 1909

“When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910

“Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

“The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

“But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 1923

The G.K. Chesterton Study and Documentation Centre is an open, active and first-hand platform intended for researchers, scholars or any of those interested in the life and works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), with the aim of making public and disseminating his thinking and his intellectual milieu from interwar Europe to the present.

Chesterton’s ideas in the modern world. His thinking and his works prove to be a valuable legacy which must be incorporated into the debate on the definition of Europe, with the broader aim of documenting —chiefly through periodical publications— humanistic influences of a Christian democrat nature in the process of globalization which the world is going through today.

Chesterton’s relationship with Catalonia. His two visits in Catalonia, in 1926 and 1935, along with the circulation of his and other English writers’ work, encouraged an exchange of ideas, outlooks and literary models. He inspired writers, journalists and thinkers such as Marià Manent, Pau Romeva or Maurici Serrahima, amongst others, as well as a group of Amics de Chesterton (Friends of Chesterton) which promoted the translation of his works.