19 of the Most Refreshingly Commonsensical G.K. Chesterton Quotes
A person can never get enough of the great Apostle of Common Sense.
Enjoy!
1) “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
The Everlasting Man, 1925
2) “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
ILN, 4/19/30
3) “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”
ILN, 7/16/10
4) “There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”
ILN, 1/13/06
5) “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
What’s Wrong With The World, Chapter 5, 1910
6) “These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”
ILN 8/11/28
7) “It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”
His book, “Charles Dickens”
8) “Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”
ILN, 9/11/09
9) “Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”
What’s Wrong With the World
10) “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
ILN, 5/5/28
11) “It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism.”
ILN, 5-4-07
12) “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
Where All Roads Lead, 1922
13) “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907
14) “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
ILN, 10/23/09
15) “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”
The Uses of Diversity, 1921
16) “The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.”
NY Sun 11/3/18
17) “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.”
Autobiography, 1937
18) “You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”
How I Met the President, Tremendous Trifles
19) “Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.”
Wells and the World State, What I Saw in America
All quotes and sources taken from The American Chesterton Society.