Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

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

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

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.

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.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

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.

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

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

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

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

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

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.