Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

102. “Original sin is the only doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

103. “How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

104. “Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

105. “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

106. “Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

107. “For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

108. “In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

109. “Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

110. “I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

111. “Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

112. “Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

113. “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.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

114. “The test of happiness is gratitude.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

115. “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

116. “Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

117. “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

118. “Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

119. “A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

120. “Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

121. “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

122. “Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

123. “Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

124. “The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

125. “When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

126. “For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

127. “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

128. “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

129. “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

130. “I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

131. “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

132. “Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

133. “The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.””

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

134. “A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

135. “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

136. “Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

137. “Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

138. “We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

139. “The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

140. “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

141. “A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

142. “Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

143. “The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

144. “Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

145. “Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

146. “At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

147. “Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

148. “The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

149. “The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

150. “The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton