G.K. Chesterton

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget."

"As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly."

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

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

"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."

"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."

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

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

"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."

"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."

"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."

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

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

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

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