Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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Gilbert K. Chesterton

Profession : Writer

Birth : May 29, 1874

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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 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

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton