Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

'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.'
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

New roads; new ruts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
Gilbert K. Chesterton