G. K. Chesterton

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

“Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.”

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

“Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”

“They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it...”

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

“I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere el...”

“Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown...”

“As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.”

“Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.”

“The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwi...”

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

“In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.”

“[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.”

“Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.”

“La sua logica è straordinariamente lucida e fredda e invariabilmente lo porta fuori strada. Ma all'improvviso interviene la poesia in lui a riportarlo in carreggiata.”

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

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who...”

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play h...”