G.K. Chesterton

"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 he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it."

"We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God."

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

"There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied."

"He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic, he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it."

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

"I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story."

"The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved."

"The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister."

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."

"It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, Give me money. Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. Budge’s Boots are the Best simply means Give me money; Use Seraphic Soap simply means Give me money. It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses."

"The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick."

"A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate."

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."

"“The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.”"

"Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle."

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."

"“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”"