Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

252. “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

253. “Art is the signature of man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

255. “I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

256. “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

257. “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

258. “The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

259. “A yawn is a silent shout.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

267. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

280. “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Coincidences are spiritual puns.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

284. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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