Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

202. “He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

203. “The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

204. “I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

205. “Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

206. “Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

207. “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

208. “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

209. “There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

210. “Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

211. “The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

212. “Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

213. “War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

214. “Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

215. “The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

216. “We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

217. “They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words – ‘free-love’ – as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

218. “Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

219. “The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

220. “If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

221. “There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

222. “Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

223. “I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do – I can die.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

224. “I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

225. “Surprise is the secret of joy.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

226. “There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

227. “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

228. “The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

229. “Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

230. “One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

231. “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

232. “Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

233. “To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

234. “Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

235. “But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

236. “Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

237. “Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

238. “Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

239. “We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

240. “And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

241. “Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

242. “In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

243. “All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

244. “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

245. “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

246. “Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

247. “Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

248. “You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

249. “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

250. “When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton