G. K. Chesterton

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news.

Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.

The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they …

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.

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

As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or …

Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas ... for it is the assertion of a universal negative

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

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

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not …

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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.

[A]rt is limitation. [...] The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid.