Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

152. “A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

154. “How much larger your life would be if you were smaller in it...”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

156. “Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

157. “The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

158. “The supreme adventure is being BORN.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “It is always the secure who are humble.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

163. “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

164. “There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

165. “The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

166. “Tolerance is a virtue of people who don’t believe in anything anymore.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

167. “Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

168. “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

169. “Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

170. “The cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

171. “For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

172. “The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

173. “The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

174. “It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

175. “All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

176. “Faith means believing the unbelievable.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

177. “Paradox – Truth standing on her head to get attention.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

178. “The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

179. “What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

180. “These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

181. “Romance is the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Featured in: Romance Quotes

182. “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

183. “I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

184. “In anything that does cover the whole of your life – in your philosophy and your religion – you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

185. “America is the only country ever founded on a creed.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Featured in: Country Quotes

186. “We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

187. “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

188. “Plato was right, but not quite right.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

189. “All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

190. “All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Featured in: Real Quotes

191. “Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

192. “A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Featured in: Intelligence Quotes

193. “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

194. “All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

195. “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

196. “When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

197. “The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

198. “True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

199. “The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

200. “A Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton