Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

153. “He may be mad, but there’s method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It’s what drives men mad, being methodical.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

154. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

156. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

158. “The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

159. “The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

163. “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

167. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

169. “The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

171. “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

172. “The supreme adventure is being BORN.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

177. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

182. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

186. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

191. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

194. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

196. “Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

197. “The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

198. “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

199. “Faith means believing the unbelievable.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

200. “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