G. K. Chesterton

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

The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.

This diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.

Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. . . . When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

Fairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairytale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.

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.

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent’s faith is to say I must not discuss it.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—” free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice.

The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are.

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

A tragedy means always a man’s struggle with that which is stronger than man.

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet.

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

Spring never is Spring unless it comes too soon.

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.

If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irritants to each other.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

They also serve who only stand wait for the two-fif- teen [train].

Your next-door neighbour ... is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.