Gilbert K. Chesterton

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

There nearly always is a method in madness.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

Progress is the mother of problems.

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

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

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.