Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

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

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.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

The criminal is the creative artist the detective only the critic.

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

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor.

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

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.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

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

Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.

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

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

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

The cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, but that the dead are living.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

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?

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

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.

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

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

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

People that insist upon drinking and driving are putting the quart before the hearse.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

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

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

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

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

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

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

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.

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

Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.

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

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

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

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

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

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

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

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

Whenever you remove any fence always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

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

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

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

Thanks are the highest form of thought.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

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

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

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

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

A dying monarchy is always one that has too much power, not too little; a dying religion always interferes more than it ought, not less.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

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.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

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.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.

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

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.

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

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

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

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

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