Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

452. “All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

453. “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

454. “All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

455. “The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

456. “The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

457. “Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

458. “The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

459. “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

460. “The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

461. “Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other’s.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

462. “Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

464. “When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

465. “The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

466. “Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

467. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

468. “The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

469. “Silence is the unbearable repartee.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

470. “The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

479. “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

480. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

482. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

484. “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

485. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

486. “I am at one with my duality.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

489. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

492. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

495. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

497. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

499. “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

500. “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