Top 500 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

403. “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

404. “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

406. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

415. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

427. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

429. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

432. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

438. “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

444. “A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

445. “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

446. “The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

447. “Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

448. “Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

449. “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

450. “It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton