Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

All true knowledge contradicts common sense.

To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.

Science is not wisdom.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact. ~ Sherlock Holmes

Two truths cannot contradict one another.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

I believe science has a wonderful ability, in an unbiased way, to offer hope to many people who are confused, but it's not the only way to find hope.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

A belief may be larger than a fact.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.