A biography for G. K. Chestertonhasn’t been written yet.
“For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.”
“My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,”
“The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.”
“Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.”
“Men that are men again: Who goes home?Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home?For there's blood on the grass and blood on the foam,And blood on the body, when Man comes home.And a voice valedictory: Who is for victory?Who is for liberty? Who goes home?”
“In the city set upon slime and loam,They cry in their Parliament, "Who goes home?"And there comes no answer in arch or dome,For none in the city of graves goes home.Yet these shall perish and understand,For God has pity on this great land.”
“But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You mustn’t give him beans.”
“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.”
“There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.”
“He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.”
“It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.”
“He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news.”
“Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.”
“The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.”
“A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.”
“The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.”
“It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.”
“Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.”
“The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.”
“As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.”