for X
A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.
G K. Chesterton • The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC)
Nationalism
It would be worse still if this short human life were broken up into yet shorter lives, each of which was in its turn forgotten.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
But I do say, to start with, “What can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries?” Unless a man love his wife whom he has seen, how shall he love his child whom he has not seen?
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
We are as solid as most truly false things are—a dance of particles in space. Only the things no one can touch are true, as you should know by now.
Gene Wolfe • Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'

Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“Life is a series of disappoints, of promises that come to nothing”
All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Orthodoxy
every act of will is an act of self-limitation — just as a painter chooses the frame, the borders, the subject

Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“I don’t have any original thoughts. I just have the thoughts that millions of people have when they look at the sea or the stars.”
A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
live upon their wits (or not so much, perhaps, upon the presence of their own wits as upon the absence of wits in other people)