G.K. Chesterton

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

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

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."

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

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

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

"The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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