Quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

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.

Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.

The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.

I may not practice what I preach but God forbid I should preach what I practice

We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

The old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.

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.

The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

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.

The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.

All government is an ugly necessity.

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

We are passing into a social phase in which unless a heroic effort is made for human dignity and freedom, gold will be the sole method of government and therefore the sole standard of manners.