G. K. Chesterton

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

“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame and money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well.”

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

“Love 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.”

“I 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 mo...”

“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

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

“We 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...”

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”

“Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”

“But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”

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

“The 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 Tolst...”

“Nobody 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 an...”

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

“He 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 l...”

“...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...”