Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”

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

“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”

“The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.”

“Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”

“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

“An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”

“With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.”

“People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”

“If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.”

“The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.”

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”

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

“Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.”

“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

“Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.”

“What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.”

“One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.”

“The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”