Quotes from G. K. Chesterton

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grapenuts on principle.

Burn from my brain and from my breastSloth, and the cowardice that clings,And stiffness and the soul's arrest:And feed my brain with better things.

It is always the secure who are humble.

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

Step softly, under snow or rain,To find the place where men can pray;The way is all so very plainThat we may lose the way.

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

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

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Upon my soul, this water tastes quite nice. I wonder what vintage now?... It tastes just like the year 1881 tasted.

For the great Gaels of IrelandAre the men that God made mad,For all their wars are merry,And all their songs are sad.

A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticized. Our relations with a good joke are direct and even divine relations.

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

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.