Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I don’t need a church to tell me I’m wrong where I already know I’m wrong; I need a Church to tell me I’m wrong where I think I’m right.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

52. “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

53. “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

54. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

55. “There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

56. “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

57. “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

58. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

59. “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

60. “There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

61. “Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

62. “We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

63. “Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

64. “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

65. “Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

66. “Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

67. “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

68. “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

69. “Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

70. “We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

71. “The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

72. “Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

73. “What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

74. “Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

75. “Passion makes every detail important.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

76. “Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

77. “We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man’s terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

78. “Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

79. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

80. “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

81. “Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

82. “The best kind of giving is thanksgiving.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

83. “In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

85. “The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

86. “Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

87. “Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

88. “You don’t want to be so open minded that your brains fall out!”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

89. “My brain and this world don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

90. “The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

91. “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

92. “Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

93. “We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

94. “A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

95. “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

96. “Hell is God’s great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

97. “There are many ways to fall down, but there’s only one way to stand up straight.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

98. “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

99. “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason...”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

100. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton