Quotations - Religion and Faith

"One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created." – G.K. Chesterton, 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." - G.K. Chesterton, 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." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN, 1/13/06

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

"When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, "Why did you join the Church of Rome?" the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, "To get rid of my sins." For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people's sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned." G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - G.K. Chesterton, 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." - G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

"Theology is only thought applied to religion." - G.K. Chesterton, 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." - G.K. Chesterton, ILN 1-3-20

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

"Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake." - G.K. Chesterton, Blake

"Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate." - G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, Ch. 5

"The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why." - G.K. Chesterton, "On Christmas," Generally Speaking

"Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"There are two ways of renouncing the devil," said Father Brown; "and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Secret of Flambeau"

"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there." - G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

"There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it." - G.K. Chesterton, "The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett" Fancies vs. Fads

“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.” - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy