G.K. Chesterton

“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”

“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

“It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”

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

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

“Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, 'We also have suffered.”

“You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.”

“You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?”

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.”

“You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

“The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.”

“He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.”

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

“But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”

“Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”