G.K. Chesterton quotes:

Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.'My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

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

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. 'Odd, isn't it,' he said, 'that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?

Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessorof it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-mindedRationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery andblasphemy; just as their prototypes, the sad and high-minded Stoics ofold Rome, did mistake the Christian joyousness for buffoonery andblasphemy.

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.

Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessorof it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-mindedRationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery andblasphemy; just as their prototypes, the sad and high-minded Stoics ofold Rome, did mistake the Christian joyousness for buffoonery andblasphemy."

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf

One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.

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

It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude.

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

You don't expect me, he said, to revolutionize society on this lawn?Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.No, I don't, he said; but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides.

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.

Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god."

The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic."

The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself."

I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free."

Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it."

Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight."

The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic."

Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined."

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

A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged he wants to be healed because he has been hurt

You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

There is no bigot like the atheist.

Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who really ought to have been eaten by lions.

The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.

For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.

{We} have not to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule; rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.

The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.

We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

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.

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.

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.

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

It is quaint that people talk about separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.

Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things

We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

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

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?'Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: 'If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

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

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

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

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.

Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.

A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.

As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

The huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.

But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.

The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

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

If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.

Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly."No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as green banners.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.

He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

The dreadful joy Thy Son has sentIs heavier than any care;We find, as Cain his punishment,Our pardon more than we can bear.