100 Classic One-Liners from G. K. Chesterton

The ever-quotable GKC:

I can never get enough of the great Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). I have featured, discussed or quoted from the famous English writer nearly 300 times on this site, and I am certain to continue doing so. Those knowing little or nothing about him might check out this introductory piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/01/24/notable-christians-g-k-chesterton/

Chesterton is one of the most quotable authors out there. I have often featured large slabs of his important works here. But simply running with a series of short quotes is another way to showcase the man and his voluminous literary output. So enjoy some of these brief, pithy and punchy quotes, presented in rough alphabetical order.  

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

All government is an ugly necessity.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

At least five times the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

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

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

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

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Don’t take a fence down unless you first find out why it was put up.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

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

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Fallacies do not cease to become fallacies when they become fashions.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

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

If there were not God, there would be no atheists.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

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

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.

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

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

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

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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

Man’s most pragmatic need is to be something more than a pragmatist.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Men do not differ much about what things they call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education.

Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

One problem with being an atheist is that when something good happens, there is no one to thank.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

That which is ridiculous deserves to be ridiculed.

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

The Church is always defending, on behalf of humanity, what the world at the moment is stupidly attacking.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle — and not lose it.

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

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult, and left untried.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

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

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.

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

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

The unpardonable sin is being bored.

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

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

The world will never starve for lack of wonders, but only for lack of wonder.

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

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read. 

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.    

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.    

There is no better test of a man’s ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.

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.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

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

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

We must hate the world enough to change it but love it enough to think it worth changing.

While a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace.

Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

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

You can’t have the family farm without the family.

You do not know a tyranny until it is on top of you; until it has you in a trap. The tyrant is not present until he is omnipresent.

You look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times and you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

Afterword

There are so many more such quotes. You might think I have left off a few of his most famous ones, but there are well-known quotes which are attributed to GKC that seem not to have actually been penned by him. Here are three notable examples of this:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

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

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

[1937 words]