Top 10 G.K. Chesterton Quotes (Most Famous)
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
— G.K. Chesterton
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
— G.K. Chesterton
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
— G.K. Chesterton
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
— G.K. Chesterton
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
— G.K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
— G.K. Chesterton
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
— G.K. Chesterton
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
— G.K. Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
— G.K. Chesterton
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
— G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton Quotes on death
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
— G.K. Chesterton
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
— G.K. Chesterton
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. Gilbert K. Chesterton
— G.K. Chesterton
It’s scary to imagine how many monuments and masterpiece were destroyed by revolutions
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. Gilbert K. Chesterton
— G.K. Chesterton
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees. Gilbert K. Chesterton
— G.K. Chesterton
The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
— G.K. Chesterton
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death
— William Shakespeare
G.K. Chesterton Quotes on Christianity
Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.
— G.K. Chesterton
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The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
— G.K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
— G.K. Chesterton
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
— G.K. Chesterton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
— G.K. Chesterton
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
— G.K. Chesterton
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
— G.K. Chesterton
One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.
— G.K. Chesterton
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
— G.K. Chesterton
Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
— G.K. Chesterton
Theology is only thought applied to religion.
— G.K. Chesterton
The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.
— G.K. Chesterton
These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
— G.K. Chesterton
It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
— G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton Quotes on Education
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
— G.K. Chesterton
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
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
— G.K. Chesterton
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
— G.K. Chesterton
It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.
— G.K. Chesterton
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
— G.K. Chesterton
The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
— G.K. Chesterton
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
— G.K. Chesterton
There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.
— G.K. Chesterton
The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
— G.K. Chesterton
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
— G.K. Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
— G.K. Chesterton
The Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
— G.K. Chesterton
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
— G.K. Chesterton
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
— G.K. Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
— G.K. Chesterton
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
— G.K. Chesterton
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
— G.K. Chesterton
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
— G.K. Chesterton
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
— G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton Quotes on Love
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
— G.K. Chesterton
A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.
— G.K. Chesterton
They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words – ‘free-love’ – as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
— G.K. Chesterton
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
— G.K. Chesterton
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
— G.K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
— G.K. Chesterton
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
— G.K. Chesterton
The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the Spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.
— G.K. Chesterton
In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.
— G.K. Chesterton
It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
— G.K. Chesterton
To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.
— G.K. Chesterton
Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
— G.K. Chesterton
The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.
— G.K. Chesterton
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
— G.K. Chesterton
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.
— G.K. Chesterton
One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.
— G.K. Chesterton
Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.
— G.K. Chesterton
A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.
— G.K. Chesterton
In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.
Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.
— G.K. Chesterton
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.
— G.K. Chesterton
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.
— G.K. Chesterton
Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
— G.K. Chesterton
The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.
— G.K. Chesterton
Digestion exists for health, and health exists for life, and life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.
— G.K. Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
— G.K. Chesterton
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
— G.K. Chesterton
There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
— G.K. Chesterton
As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
— G.K. Chesterton
More Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
— G.K. Chesterton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
— G.K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
— G.K. Chesterton
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
— G.K. Chesterton
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
— G.K. Chesterton
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
— G.K. Chesterton
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
— G.K. Chesterton
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
— G.K. Chesterton
The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
— G.K. Chesterton
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
— G.K. Chesterton
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
— G.K. Chesterton
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
— G.K. Chesterton
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
— G.K. Chesterton
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
— G.K. Chesterton
A yawn is a silent shout.
— G.K. Chesterton
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
— G.K. Chesterton
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
— G.K. Chesterton
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
— G.K. Chesterton
If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
— G.K. Chesterton
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
— G.K. Chesterton
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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
— G.K. Chesterton
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
— G.K. Chesterton
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
— G.K. Chesterton
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
— G.K. Chesterton
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
— G.K. Chesterton
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
— G.K. Chesterton
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
— G.K. Chesterton
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
— G.K. Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
— G.K. Chesterton
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
— G.K. Chesterton
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
— G.K. Chesterton
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
— G.K. Chesterton
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
— G.K. Chesterton
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
— G.K. Chesterton
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
— G.K. Chesterton
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
— G.K. Chesterton
A stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
— G.K. Chesterton
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
— G.K. Chesterton
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
— G.K. Chesterton
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
— G.K. Chesterton
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
— G.K. Chesterton
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.
— G.K. Chesterton
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
— G.K. Chesterton
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
— G.K. Chesterton
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
— G.K. Chesterton
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
— G.K. Chesterton Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
— G.K. Chesterton
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
— G.K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
— G.K. Chesterton
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
— G.K. Chesterton
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
— G.K. Chesterton
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
— G.K. Chesterton
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
— G.K. Chesterton
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
— G.K. Chesterton
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
— G.K. Chesterton
A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
— G.K. Chesterton
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
— G.K. Chesterton
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
— G.K. Chesterton
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
— G.K. Chesterton
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
— G.K. Chesterton
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
— G.K. Chesterton
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
— G.K. Chesterton
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
— G.K. Chesterton
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
— G.K. Chesterton
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
— G.K. Chesterton
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
— G.K. Chesterton
When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
— G.K. Chesterton
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
— G.K. Chesterton
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
— G.K. Chesterton
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.
— G.K. Chesterton
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
— G.K. Chesterton
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
— G.K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
— G.K. Chesterton
Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
— G.K. Chesterton
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
— G.K. Chesterton
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
— G.K. Chesterton
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
— G.K. Chesterton
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
— G.K. Chesterton
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
— G.K. Chesterton
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
— G.K. Chesterton
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
— G.K. Chesterton
Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
— G.K. Chesterton
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
— G.K. Chesterton
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
— G.K. Chesterton
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
— G.K. Chesterton
Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
— G.K. Chesterton
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
— G.K. Chesterton
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
— G.K. Chesterton
‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’
— G.K. Chesterton
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
— G.K. Chesterton
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
— G.K. Chesterton
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
— G.K. Chesterton
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
— G.K. Chesterton
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
— G.K. Chesterton
Being ‘contented’ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
— G.K. Chesterton
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
— G.K. Chesterton
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
— G.K. Chesterton
White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
— G.K. Chesterton
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
— G.K. Chesterton
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
— G.K. Chesterton
There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
— G.K. Chesterton
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
— G.K. Chesterton
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
— G.K. Chesterton
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
— G.K. Chesterton
