I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
A yawn is a silent shout.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
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.
I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.
The simplification of anything is always sensational.
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.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
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.
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
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.
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
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.
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
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.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
