Gilbert K. Chesterton

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

“It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.”

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.”

“Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.”

“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”

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

“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.”

“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”

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

“The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”

“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

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

“People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.”

“I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.”

“Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.”

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”