G.K. Chesterton

There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.

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.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

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.

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.

While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen__hat creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics_I am not frightened of the word __ersecution__It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof__hen our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

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

Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.

But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.