G. K. Chesterton

Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and …

The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good.

Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull.

Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.

Round the birth of "Pickwick" broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens.... He turned people into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes.

[Dickens] was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill.

These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it.

Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological paradox; he is a little too irritable because he is a little too happy. Dickens was always a little too …

The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world.

No man encouraged his characters so much as Dickens. "I am an affectionate father," he says, "to every child of my fancy." He was not only an affectionate father, he was an overindulgent father. The children of his fancy are spoilt …

And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.... It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel …

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.

Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be …

The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.

Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague."

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

Men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.

Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction ... for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.

"Bosh," he said, "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres."

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise—too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with …