Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

352. “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

353. “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

354. “Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

355. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

360. “A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

367. “It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

368. “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

369. “The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

371. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

373. “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

374. “Nothing is certain by uncertainty.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

375. “We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

376. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

382. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

384. “A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

385. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

388. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

390. “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

391. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

393. “The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they never suffer.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

394. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

399. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

400. “Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton