G.K. Chesterton Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

2. Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

3. Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile. The Thing: Why I am a Catholic

4. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four. Heretics / Orthodoxy

5. Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

6. I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

7. It's easy to be heavy; hard to be light.

8. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind. Orthodoxy

9. Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

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

11. The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad. The Ballad of the White Horse

12. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact. All Things Considered

13. 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.

14. There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

15. There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial. The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 29: The Illustrated London News, 1911-1913

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

17. Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

18. When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

19. ..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture. Fancies Versus Fads

20. ...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. Orthodoxy

21. ...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain. The Superstition of Divorce

22. Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

23. For in truth I believe that the only way to say anything definite is to define it, and all definition is by limitation and exclusion; and that the only way to say something distinct is to say something indistinguishable from everything else. In short, I think that a man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying. As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

24. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

25. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it. Orthodoxy

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

27. How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles and leave you in the open - free like other men to look up, as well as down. And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil. It does not seek to argue with it like a heresy, but simply to slap it like a spell. Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid. Orthodoxy

28. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

29. 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.

30. One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. All Things Considered