Gilbert K. Chesterton

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

To be simple is the best thing in the world.

One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

Posting a letter and getting married [sic] are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable

Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

The center of every man's existence is a dream.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.