G K Chesterton on Christian Faith

Religion and Faith

• "The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist." Ð ILN 9-18-09

• "One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created." - The Boston Sunday Post, 1/16/21

• "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

• "If there were no God, there would be no atheists." - Where All Roads Lead, 1922
• "There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." - ILN, 1/13/06

• "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

• "The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907

• "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." - Charles Dickens

• "Theology is only thought applied to religion." - The New Jerusalem

• "The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." - ILN 1-3-20

• "These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." - ILN 8-11-28

• "Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake." - Blake
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Morality and Truth

• "Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." - ILN, 5/5/28

• "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

• "It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them." - ILN, 3/14/08

• "There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth." - ILN, 7/18/08

• "The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice." - ILN, 6/11/10

• "Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it." - ILN, 2/24/06

• "Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks." - Daily News, 2/21/02

• "It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong." - The Catholic Church and Conversion

• "There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners." - The Father Brown Omnibus

• "All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them." - ILN 3/14/08

• "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

• "I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it." - ILN 8/4/06

• "To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea." - Heretics, CW I, p128

• "Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified." - ILN 9-30-33

• "The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea." - T.P.'s Weekly, Christmas Number, 1910

• "All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." - The Thing. CW. III 191

• "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

• "If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty." - What's Wrong with the World

• "The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure." - Speech to Anglo-Catholic Congress 6-29-20

• "What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another." - Daily News12-21-05

• "There are some desires that are not desirable." - Orthodoxy

• "In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn." - The Speaker 2-2-01

• "Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else." - "The Church of the Servile State" Utopia of Usurers

• "It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can." - The Coloured Lands

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Love, Marriage and The Sexes

• "Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905

• "A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage." - Chaucer

• "Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men." - A Handful of Authors

• "The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis." - "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens, 1911

• "A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is." - Robert Browning

• "Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue." - Chesterton on Dickens

• "Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline." - Manalive

• "The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous." - ILN 1/9/09

• "I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess." - The Victorian Age in Literature

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Thanks to the Chesterton society for the quotes