Gilbert K. Chesterton

“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.”

“Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.”

“Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”

“Half a truth is better than no politics.”

“It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.”

“And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.”

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

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

“The only defensible war is a war of defense.”

“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.”

“A yawn is a silent shout.”

“Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.”

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

“Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

“The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

“Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.”