[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.

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

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be...

Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find—the craving for a father, the hunger that...

Fairy tales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and...

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being...

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer. Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who...

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake...

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

I am not good at deception,’ said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.Right, my boy, right,’ said the President with a ponderous heartiness, ‘You aren’t good at anything.

In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, “Who wants...

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play...

But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form,...

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

Are you a devil?””I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.

The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are...

Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much...

Journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this...

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

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 great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as...

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape...

The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful...

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.

Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big...

It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men’smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy...

The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you...

There nearly always is a method in madness.

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land...

An artist is identical with an anarchist,’ he cried. ‘You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment...

My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the...

There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing...

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the...

When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward – in a word,...

[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing–such as making love.

For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears,...

What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers...

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to...