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.”

“All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

“I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.”

“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.”

“I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”

“The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”

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

“Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.”

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

“Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.”

“The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

“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.”

“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

“We make our friends we make our enemies but God makes our next door neighbour.”

“Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.”

“White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

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

“We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.”

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

“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

“One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak.”

“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.”

“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.”