Gilbert K. Chesterton

For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.

Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.

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.

I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess.

There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.