Friday, September 6, 2013

The quotable G. K. Chesterton

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

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

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

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

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

My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

New roads; new ruts.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. ...The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

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