Gilbert K. Chesterton Mad Quotations

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.

There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

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.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane...

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

Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.