G.K Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) was an English writer, layer-person theologian, philosopher, and literary and art critic. He was known as the ‘Prince of Paradox’ due to turning his points inside out using allegories, proverbs, popular sayings, etc.

Check out these extraordinary quotes by GK Chesterton and be enlightened!

Here are 94 Powerful G.K Chesterton Quotes:

1. “Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.” – G.K Chesterton

2. “Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.” – G.K Chesterton

3. “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” – G.K Chesterton

4. “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.” – G.K Chesterton

5. “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.” – G.K Chesterton

6. “Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” – G.K Chesterton

7. “It is always the secure who are humble.” – G.K Chesterton

8. “As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.” – G.K Chesterton

9. “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” – G.K Chesterton

10. “How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.” – G.K Chesterton

11. “A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.” – G.K Chesterton

12. “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” – G.K Chesterton

13. “A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.” – G.K Chesterton

 

14. “Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.” – G.K Chesterton

15. “Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.” – G.K Chesterton

16. “I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.” – G.K Chesterton

17. “The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.” – G.K Chesterton

18. “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” – G.K Chesterton

19. “Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.” – G.K Chesterton

20. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

21. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

22. “The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.” – G.K Chesterton

23. “Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.” – G.K Chesterton

24. “The present condition of fame is merely fashion.” – G.K Chesterton

25. “The simplification of anything is always sensational.” – G.K Chesterton

26. “The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.” – G.K Chesterton

 

27. “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.” – G.K Chesterton

28. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

29. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

30. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

31. “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” – G.K Chesterton

32. “Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.” – G.K Chesterton

33. “When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven’s name to what?” – G.K Chesterton

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35. “Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.” – G.K Chesterton

36. “Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.” – G.K Chesterton

37. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G.K Chesterton

38. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

39. “But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.” – G.K Chesterton

40. “If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.” – G.K Chesterton

41. “Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.” – G.K Chesterton

42. “The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.” – G.K Chesterton

 

43. “A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.” – G.K Chesterton

44. “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally, they are the same people.” – G.K Chesterton

45. “The simplification of anything is always sensational.” – G.K Chesterton

46. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

47. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

48. “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” – G.K Chesterton

49. “A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.” – G.K Chesterton

 

50. “It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.” – G.K Chesterton

51. “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.” – G.K Chesterton

52. “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” – G.K Chesterton

53. “When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” – G.K Chesterton

54. “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.” – G.K Chesterton

55. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

56. “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.” – G.K Chesterton

57. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

58. “Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.” – G.K Chesterton

59. “The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.” – G.K Chesterton

60. “The only defensible war is a war of defense.” – G.K Chesterton

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62. “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” – G.K Chesterton

63. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

64. “People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.” – G.K Chesterton

65. “Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.” – G.K Chesterton

66. “The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.” – G.K Chesterton

67. “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” – G.K Chesterton

 

68. “Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.” – G.K Chesterton

69. “There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.” – G.K Chesterton

70. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

71. “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become theirs that they may more perfectly respect it.” – G.K Chesterton

72. “People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.” – G.K Chesterton

73. “God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.” – G.K Chesterton

74. “Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.” – G.K Chesterton

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

76. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

77. “Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.” – G.K Chesterton

78. “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” – G.K Chesterton

79. “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.” – G.K Chesterton

80. “And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.” – G.K Chesterton

 

81. “Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.” – G.K Chesterton

82. “An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” – G.K Chesterton

83. “I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.” – G.K Chesterton

84. “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” – G.K Chesterton

85. “You’ll never find the solution if you don’t see the problem.” – G.K Chesterton

86. “What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.” – G.K Chesterton

87. “Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.” – G.K Chesterton

88. “We make our friends; we make our enemies, but God makes our next-door neighbor.” – G.K Chesterton

89. “What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.” – G.K Chesterton

90. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

91. “To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.” – G.K Chesterton

92. “For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.” – G.K Chesterton

93. “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.” – G.K Chesterton

94. “Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either.”

Which G.K Chesterton quote is your favorite and why? Comment below!