Gilbert K. Chesterton

“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

“The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

“I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.”

“Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.”

“The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.”

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man...”

“Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.”

“We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.”

“The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.”

“Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.”

“The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.”

“Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.”

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

“The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.”

“The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

“The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.”

“The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”

“There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.”