G. K. Chesterton

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

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

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

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

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

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

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

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

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

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

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

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

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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

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

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.

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

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

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.

'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.'

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

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

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

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.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.