Gilbert K. Chesterton

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.

The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.

People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.

The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.

Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say, ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.