G.K. Chesterton

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it."

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

"Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality."

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

"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 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."