G. K. Chesterton

“...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.”

“We know better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the Great Mother had a daughter wedded to dea...”

“We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.”

“For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

“If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.”

“The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams c...”

“I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller”

“Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.”

“When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.”

“Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.”

“He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand...”

“The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.”

“Man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.”

“There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.”

“Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”

“The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.”

“Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.”

“Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.”

“The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”

“A Second Childhood.” When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and...”