Quotes from GK Chesterton

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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

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.

The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return....Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realise in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows and that all things are but aspects of one thing a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God 'No,' said Father Brown.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it.

It seems a pity that Psychology should have destroyed all our knowledge of human nature. It is a natural enough catastrophe; for the very act of changing it from a matter of common sense to a matter of scientific enquiry, labelled and separated as a science, involves a change which nobody has adequately noted.

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".

If man is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust.

"Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?

Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.