The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]

Without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, “You can’t stop me: I am above reason now.”

The difficulty of believing in democracy is that it is so hard to believe—like God and most other good things.

The mediaeval spirit loves its part in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something else.

The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics.

regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediaevals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal fre

History tends to be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day.

Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest text–book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and ol

the English plutocrat began to understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their impotence had been his only power. The truth was not merely that his riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could have been strong enough to make him rich.

An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool.

When something happens, it happens first, and you see it afterwards. It happens of itself, and you have nothing to do with it. It proves a dreadful thing—that there are other things besides one’s self.