01UndatedThe Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
02UndatedTo love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
03UndatedLove is not blind that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
04UndatedThe true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
05UndatedI wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
06UndatedThere is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
07UndatedIt [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
08UndatedA dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
09UndatedThere is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
10UndatedWe have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
11UndatedI am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
12UndatedBecause children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
13UndatedThe great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
14UndatedHumor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
15UndatedBut there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
17UndatedThe wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
18UndatedNobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
19UndatedScience must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
20UndatedHe must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
21Undated...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
22Undated...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
23UndatedThe work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
