Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

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

I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right

The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

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.

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

When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven's name to what?

I've searched all the parks in all the cities - and found no statues of Committees.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Fairy tales are more than true.

Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

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

Faith means believing the unbelievable.

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

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

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

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

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.

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.

Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.

The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

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

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

You'll never find the solution if you don't see the problem.

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.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

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.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.