Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes | GloryQuotes

Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Life

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

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Love

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

More Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. 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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Browse 142 quotes attributed to Gilbert K. Chesterton, listed in the source data as a English Writer, organized around themes such as Life, Love, Spiritual. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.