Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

154. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

157. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

160. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

166. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

170. “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

171. “The supreme adventure is being BORN.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

174. “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

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. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

189. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “Faith means believing the unbelievable.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

197. “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

198. “The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong. However, he’s often wrong about what is right.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

199. “In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

200. “Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton