Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

303. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

305. “There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

306. “Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

307. “Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

308. “If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

309. “Sticking to one woman is a small price to pay for so much as having seen one woman.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

310. “Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

311. “Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

312. “Where does a wise man kick a pebble? On the beach. Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

313. “The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

314. “Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

315. “Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

316. “A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

317. “Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

318. “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

319. “And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.””

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

320. “Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

321. “What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

322. “By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

323. “The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

324. “The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

325. “Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

326. “In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

327. “Gluttony is a great fault; but we do not necessarily dislike a glutton. We only dislike the glutton when he becomes a gourmet-that is, we only dislike him when he not only wants the best for himself, but knows what is best for other people.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

328. “At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

329. “If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

330. “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

331. “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

332. “The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

333. “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

334. “You can’t have the family farm without the family.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

335. “If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

336. “The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

337. “Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

338. “The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

339. “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

340. “Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

341. “A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

342. “It’s not the world that’s got so much worse but the news coverage that’s got so much better.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

343. “All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

344. “I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don’t, as a rule.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

345. “If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other – the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

346. “Daybreak is a never-ending glory; getting out of bed is a never ending nuisance.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

347. “One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

348. “Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

349. “A good man’s work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

350. “The word good has many meanings...”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton