Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

402. “Adventure is the champagne of life.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

403. “The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly “in the know.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

404. “It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

405. “A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

406. “If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

407. “The Special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe – and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

408. “Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

409. “The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

410. “A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

411. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

412. “We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

413. “A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

414. “I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

415. “The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

416. “But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

417. “Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

418. “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

419. “Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

420. “What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

421. “Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

422. “There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

423. “Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

424. “I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

425. “And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

426. “If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

427. “There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

428. “I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

429. “Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

430. “The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

431. “If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

432. “Do not, I beseech you be troubled by the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistake the hour of the night: it is already morning.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

433. “Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

434. “All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

435. “Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

436. “The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

437. “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

438. “The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

439. “All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

440. “The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

441. “Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

442. “The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

443. “Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

444. “The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

445. “Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

446. “The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

447. “Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other’s.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

448. “The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

449. “Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

450. “Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton