G.K. Chesterton

"Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified."

"Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms."

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

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

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

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

"A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them."

"I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward."

"Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say."

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."

"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."

"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."

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

"I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller"

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

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

"Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable."

"No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete."

"That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child."

"Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate."