Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

“Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.”

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

“The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”

“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”

“Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

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

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

“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.”

“Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.”

“The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

“Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.”

“Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.”

“The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.”

“A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.”

“Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.”

“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.”

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”

“Half a truth is better than no politics.”

“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”

“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.”

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.”

“Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.”

“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.”