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.
— 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.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.
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.
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
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.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
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.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
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.
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
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?
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
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.
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.
