Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. Profoundly inspirational GK Chesterton quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Famous GK Chesterton Quotes
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. – GK Chesterton
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt. – GK Chesterton
Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer’s day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented. – GK Chesterton
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. – GK Chesterton
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another. – GK Chesterton
All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. – GK Chesterton
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. – GK Chesterton
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. – GK Chesterton
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour. – GK Chesterton
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak. – GK Chesterton
Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it. – GK Chesterton
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity. – GK Chesterton
Being ‘contented’ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position. – GK Chesterton
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. – GK Chesterton
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition. – GK Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. – GK Chesterton
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. – GK Chesterton
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read. – GK Chesterton
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God. – GK Chesterton
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless. – GK Chesterton
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem. – GK Chesterton
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself. – GK Chesterton
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. – GK Chesterton
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite. – GK Chesterton
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. – GK Chesterton
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. – GK Chesterton
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. – GK Chesterton
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it. – GK Chesterton
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache. – GK Chesterton
Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life. – GK Chesterton
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them. – GK Chesterton
A stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt. – GK Chesterton
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense. – GK Chesterton
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all. – GK Chesterton
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them. – GK Chesterton
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act. – GK Chesterton
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head. – GK Chesterton
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow. – GK Chesterton
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes. – GK Chesterton
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. – GK Chesterton
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete. – GK Chesterton
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. – GK Chesterton
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war. – GK Chesterton
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. – GK Chesterton
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam. – GK Chesterton
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. – GK Chesterton
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. – GK Chesterton
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. – GK Chesterton
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude. – GK Chesterton
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. – GK Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. – GK Chesterton
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization. – GK Chesterton
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. – GK Chesterton
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know. – GK Chesterton
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. – GK Chesterton
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. – GK Chesterton
With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. – GK Chesterton
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. – GK Chesterton
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. – GK Chesterton
In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it. – GK Chesterton
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. – GK Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people. – GK Chesterton
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. – GK Chesterton
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. – GK Chesterton
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die. – GK Chesterton
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. – GK Chesterton
Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. – GK Chesterton
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. – GK Chesterton
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life. – GK Chesterton
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. – GK Chesterton
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it. – GK Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. – GK Chesterton
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much. – GK Chesterton
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. – GK Chesterton
‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ – GK Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. – GK Chesterton
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. – GK Chesterton
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. – GK Chesterton
Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. – GK Chesterton
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it. – GK Chesterton
There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect. – GK Chesterton
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles. – GK Chesterton
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods. – GK Chesterton
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty. – GK Chesterton
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen. – GK Chesterton
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs. – GK Chesterton
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners. – GK Chesterton
The only defensible war is a war of defense. – GK Chesterton
White… is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. – GK Chesterton
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees. – GK Chesterton
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. – GK Chesterton
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades. – GK Chesterton
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. – GK Chesterton
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. – GK Chesterton
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. – GK Chesterton
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. – GK Chesterton
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. – GK Chesterton
A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything. – GK Chesterton
The present condition of fame is merely fashion. – GK Chesterton
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper. – GK Chesterton
