Gilbert K. Chesterton

I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

The ignorant pronounce it Frood To cavil or applaud The well-informed pronounce it Froyd But I pronounce it Fraud.

But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkenness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says the Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?