Gilbert K. Chesterton

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

The old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

There are two kinds of rebellion. The first is one in which the slave demands something that the tyrant has got. The second is one in which he demands something that the tyrant has not got.

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.