Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

452. “It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

453. “One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

454. “A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

455. “I am at one with my duality.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

456. “Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

457. “Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

458. “Silence is the unbearable repartee.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

459. “All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing – and he won’t be missed either.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

460. “If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

461. “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

462. “The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

463. “There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn’t.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

464. “The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

465. “Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people’s property.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

466. “Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

467. “The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

468. “Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

469. “The center of every man’s existence is a dream.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

470. “There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

471. “An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

472. “Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

473. “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

474. “It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

475. “A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

476. “No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be...”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

477. “The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

478. “I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

479. “The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

480. “A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

481. “As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman’s arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

482. “If you’d take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it might.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

483. “You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

484. “The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

485. “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

486. “There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

487. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

488. “Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

489. “The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something – war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

490. “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

491. “Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

492. “A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

493. “To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

494. “Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

495. “If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

496. “It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

497. “And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

498. “Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

499. “Men rush toward complexity; but yearn for simplicity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

500. “The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton