Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”

“Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.”

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

“The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.”

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

“The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.”

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

“It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”

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

“A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”

“Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.”

“There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.”

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

“There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.”

“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.”

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

“No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”

“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”