G. K. Chesterton

“There is one creed: 'neath no world-terror's wing Apples forget to grow on apple-trees.”

“The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee,  His hair was like a crown,And all the flowers looked up at him,  And all the stars looked down.”

“Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”

“Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.”

“There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”

“He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.”

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

“The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”

“One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”

“Fools! For I also had my hour;  One far fierce hour and sweet:There was a shout about my ears,  And palms before my feet.”

“When fishes flew and forests walked   And figs grew upon thorn,Some moment when the moon was blood   Then surely I was born. {{pb}}With monstrous head and sickening cry   And ears like errant wings, The devil’s walking parody   On all four-footed things.”

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”