Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."

"The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it."

"The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."

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

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

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

"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."

"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."

"A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition."

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

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

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

"Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes."

"'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.'"

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."

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

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

"A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."

"When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude."

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective."

"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

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