G.K. Chesterton

This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.

, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must alwayshave been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it couldnever have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely becauseit might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.

The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

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 at the back of every artist__ 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.

of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.

Love is not blind that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

The huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.

But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.

Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.

You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly."No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.

Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.

The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.