Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

253. “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

254. “Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

255. “Art is the signature of man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

256. “Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

257. “A yawn is a silent shout.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

258. “The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

259. “Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

260. “And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

261. “Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

262. “The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

263. “People that insist upon drinking and driving, are putting the quart before the hearse.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

264. “The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

265. “Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

266. “My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

267. “He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

268. “If Christianity should happen to be true – that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe – then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

269. “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

270. “All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

271. “Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

272. “Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

273. “He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

274. “When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

275. “Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

276. “The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

277. “Coincidences are spiritual puns.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

278. “For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the Calvinist.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

279. “Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

280. “Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

281. “The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

282. “The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

283. “A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour’s landmark.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

284. “The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

285. “The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

286. “There’d be a lot less scandal if people didn’t idealize sin and pose as sinners.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

287. “I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

288. “I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

289. “If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

290. “Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

291. “Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

292. “Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

293. “The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

294. “To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

295. “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

296. “Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

298. “Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

299. “Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

300. “Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it’s something you ought to do yourself.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton