G.K. Chesterton

“In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.”

“Job tries to comfort himself with philosophical pessimism like the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first time Job is comforted. . . . Job flings at God one riddle, God flings back at Job a hundred riddles, and Job is at peace. He is comforted with conundrums.”

“The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.”

“The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.”

“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”

“Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.”

“I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.”

“The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”

“That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.”

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

“We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other but what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred for the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity's to the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never lived at all.”

“No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.”

“A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.”

“Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.”

“This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.”

“The true soldier fights”

“The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity.”

“The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain and tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the seabather comes after the icy shok of the sea bath.”

“Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.”

“ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? …At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal.”