Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.”

“'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'”

“The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.”

“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”

“It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absur...”

“Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doub...”

“The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.”

“A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.”

“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”

“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.”

“We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.”

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

“I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

“Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the an...”

“Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.”

“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

“The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.”

“Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.”

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.”

“Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”