Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

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

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

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

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 true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

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

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.

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.

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

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

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.

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

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

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

Fairy tales are more than true.

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

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

Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

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

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

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.

Faith means believing the unbelievable.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun.; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic monotony that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

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.

The modern habit of saying "This is my opinion, but I may be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" – the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

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

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

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

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

Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

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

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.

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