Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

452. “Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

453. “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

454. “Silence is the unbearable repartee.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

455. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

457. “Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

458. “Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

459. “A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

460. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

462. “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

463. “The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

464. “Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

465. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

467. “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

468. “I am at one with my duality.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

470. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

472. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

477. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

480. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

491. “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

492. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

497. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

500. “Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton