Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

352. “I may not practice what I preach but God forbid I should preach what I practice.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

353. “Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

354. “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

355. “People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

356. “A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

357. “Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

358. “In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

359. “A faith is that which is able to survive a mood.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

360. “A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

361. “The Devil’s walking parody; On all four-footed things.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

362. “The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

363. “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

364. “A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

365. “Nothing is certain by uncertainty.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

366. “Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

367. “Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

368. “I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

369. “You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

370. “We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

371. “We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

372. “Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity a a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

373. “I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

374. “A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

375. “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

376. “I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

377. “Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

378. “A crown of roses is also a crown of thorns.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

379. “Whatever the word “great” means, Dickens was what it means.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

380. “Man is at his tallest when he bows.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

381. “The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

382. “No man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

383. “Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

384. “There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

385. “The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

386. “Life is indeed terribly complicated – to a man who has lost his principles.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

387. “Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

388. “There are no new ideas.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

389. “Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

390. “Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

391. “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

392. “Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

393. “No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

394. “I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

395. “We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

396. “All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

397. “The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

398. “What we all dread most is a maze with no centre.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

399. “Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

400. “A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton