Top 100 Quotes About Chesterton
#1. Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers.
Anthony Esolen
#2. As long as matters are really hopeful," wrote Chesterton, "hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#3. G. K. Chesterton once said, 'Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.'" She
Claire Stibbe
#4. British writer G. K. Chesterton's reply to an invitation by the Times to write an essay on the subject "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's response: Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton
Dale Carnegie
#5. The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.
P.G. Wodehouse
#6. When a newspaper posed the question, "What's Wrong with the World?" the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: "Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton." That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.
Timothy Keller
#7. Chesterton is quoted as saying, When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything.
Mark Driscoll
#8. He might be living on mice, but Chesterton does not look like an animal who is governed by his appetites. He's an ascetic, if Cathbad ever saw one.
Elly Griffiths
#9. My country right or wrong is like saying my mother drunk or sober. G.K.Chesterton This is one of my favorite quotes and would bring about world peace if more knew and lived it.
Wayne Costigan
#10. Somewhere Chesterton writes
I think it is Chesterton
that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn't deliver him to.
Alec Wilkinson
#11. A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing goes against it," said G. K. Chesterton. That
Rod Dreher
#12. And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow. G. K. Chesterton
Leslie Parrott
#13. G. K. Chesterton compared fantastic fiction to going on holiday - that the importance of your holiday is the moment you return, and you see the place you live through fresh eyes.
Neil Gaiman
#14. Men are men, but Man is a woman. - Chesterton
John Crowley
#15. After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'.
Ian T. Ker
#16. When we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing. We worship anything. G. K. Chesterton
Matt Papa
#17. In reading Chesterton I was undermining my own most dearly held prejudices.
Joseph Pearce
#18. Boredom, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. 'There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject,' said Chesterton. 'The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
George Sheehan
#19. G. K. Chesterton: When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.
Pope Francis
#20. So I have also tried to be honest. And the best way I have found to be honest is to tell you my story: a journey in and out of Calvinism. As Chesterton once confessed, sometimes you have to be egotistical if you want to be sincere.3 In this reminiscing, something became
Austin Fischer
#21. Chesterton spoke of 'the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.' It would be hard to sum up liberalism for succinctly.
Joseph Sobran
#22. There was a silence. Then Paul looked at Alex.
'She knows Chesterton.'
'She lives,' said Alex.
Regina Doman
#23. (Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton* once pointed out, are not true. They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.) V
Neil Gaiman
#24. When one of England's finest writers, G. K. Chesterton, spoke of "the furious love of God," he was referencing the enormous vitality and strength of the God of Jesus seeking union with us.
Brennan Manning
#25. G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that "those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next.
Miroslav Volf
#26. The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite.
Fulton J. Sheen
#28. Reason cannot account for those moments in life that "bewilder the intellect yet utterly quiet the heart," as G.K. Chesterton observed.
Eric Weiner
#29. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. - G. K. CHESTERTON
Clare De Graaf
#30. G.K. Chesterton said: People are equal in the same way pennies are equal. Some are bright, others are dull; some are worn smooth, others are sharp and fresh. But all are equal in value for each penny bears the image of the sovereign, each person bears the image of the King of Kings.
Tim Chester
#31. As G. K. Chesterton is credited with saying, The opposite of a belief in God is not a belief in nothing; it is a belief in anything.
David Jeremiah
#32. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless or it is no virtue at all. It is only when things are hopeless that hope begins to be a strength (G. K. Chesterton). Hope is an undefeated forward look.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#33. Chesterton had an incorrigible and persistent tendency to throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater.
R. Alan Woods
#34. Along with Chesterton, I've had to take my place among those who acknowledge that we are what is wrong with the world. What is my snobbishness toward my childhood church, for instance, but an inverted form of the harsh judgment it showed me?
Philip Yancey
#35. For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or 'paradoxical' I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question.
C.S. Lewis
#36. G.K. Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything and he said it better than anybody else.
Dale Ahlquist
#37. You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you're reading G.K. Chesterton, then you're a Catholic.
Ross Douthat
#38. In reality, to quote G. K. Chesterton, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."2 Or perhaps it might be more accurately said of our time that Christianity has not been presented and therefore has been left untried.
Skye Jethani
#39. That big fat oaf Gil Chesterton once said that the criminal is the artist, the detective only the critic ... he was wrong. I was an artist, for it is an artist's purpose to make order out of chaos. A criminal defaces; a detective restores.
Lavie Tidhar
#40. Like the Society for Creative Anachronism, The Ballad of the White Horse depicted "the Middle Ages as they should have been." Chesterton's ballad made a lasting impression on Robert E. Howard, who praised it in letters to his friend Clyde Smith.
Joseph Laycock
#41. I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.
Kate Christensen
#42. Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant.
Hugh Kenner
#43. G.K. Chesterton once said: If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. I live by this philosophy when I teach writing. It seems to me vastly more important that a student try a new technique in her writing, and use it imperfectly, than never try the technique at all.
Ralph Fletcher
#44. Be at peace with being lousy for a while. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. He was right. Only an insufferable egoist expects to be brilliant first time out.
Douglas Wilson
#45. Old G.K. knew when to fast and when to down a good ale. It's the timing. It's all in the timing. [On G.K. Chesterton]
Michael D. O'Brien
#46. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (that fabulously large Catholic writer) overheard someone making fun of Milton (it didn't matter that the insults were all true).
N.D. Wilson
#47. G. K. Chesterton says chess players go crazy, not poets. I think he is right.
Donald Miller
#48. G.K. Chesterton said (in a somewhat different context), "If you believe in nothing, you'll believe in anything." That
Michael Crichton
#49. Apparently my dad wasn't the only paranoid libertarian in Chesterton.
Anonymous
#50. I'm a great fan of Chesterton, you know. He once said that he became a Catholic because we're the only religion that sees no contradiction between a pint, a pipe, and a cross.
Michael D. O'Brien
#51. G. K. Chesterton once said that to be thankful is the highest form of thought and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. Thanklessness, then,must be the lowest form of thought, and ingratitude is discontentment, bankrupted of wonder.
Ravi Zacharias
#52. Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories - first carefully turning them inside out.
G.K. Chesterton
#53. A cynic once told G. K. Chesterton, the British novelist and essayist, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." Chesterton's rejoinder? "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.
Benjamin Graham
#54. One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
Philip Yancey
#55. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, "How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it."22
Ann Voskamp
#57. No man who worships education has got the best out of education ... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
G.K. Chesterton
#58. Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,
G.K. Chesterton
#59. Eugenics, as discussed, evidently means the control of some men
over the marriage and unmarriage of others; and probably means the
control of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many
G.K. Chesterton
#60. I have a suspicion that you are all mad,' said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; 'but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.
G.K. Chesterton
#61. Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
G.K. Chesterton
#62. It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.
G.K. Chesterton
#63. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
#64. The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#65. A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
G.K. Chesterton
#66. But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#67. 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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#68. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.
G.K. Chesterton
#69. That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact.
G.K. Chesterton
#70. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.
G.K. Chesterton
#71. I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular.
G.K. Chesterton
#72. The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#73. Our age is obviously the Nonsense Age; the wiser sort of nonsense being provided for the children and the sillier sort of nonsense for the grown-up people.
G.K. Chesterton
#74. If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.
G.K. Chesterton
#76. What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
G.K. Chesterton
#77. 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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#78. It might be questioned whether hammering is more of a strain on the attention because it may go on for ever, or because it may stop at any minute.
G.K. Chesterton
#79. There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
G.K. Chesterton
#80. The primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
G.K. Chesterton
#81. It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
G.K. Chesterton
#82. Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#83. I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman ... is a despot; the average man is a serf.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#84. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
G.K. Chesterton
#86. The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#88. When we consider the possibility that God will not be good to us, we stand on the precipice of despair and peer into the darkness below.
G.K. Chesterton
#89. All women dress to be noticed: gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.
G.K. Chesterton
#90. The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#92. You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?" "A saint," said Father Brown. "I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist.
G.K. Chesterton
#94. The hardest thing to remember about our time, of course, is simply that it is a time- we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment.
G.K. Chesterton
#95. Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.
G.K. Chesterton
#96. The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point.
G.K. Chesterton
#97. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
G.K. Chesterton
#98. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
G.K. Chesterton
#99. Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy.
G.K. Chesterton
#100. True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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