G. K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy (1908)

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Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

G. K. Chesterton
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

G. K. Chesterton
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

G. K. Chesterton
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

G. K. Chesterton
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

G. K. Chesterton
If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.

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

G. K. Chesterton
If a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.

G. K. Chesterton
It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything - even pride.

G. K. Chesterton
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

G. K. Chesterton
Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

G. K. Chesterton
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

G. K. Chesterton
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

G. K. Chesterton
Betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance.

G. K. Chesterton
Democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

G. K. Chesterton
We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.

G. K. Chesterton
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

G. K. Chesterton
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

G. K. Chesterton
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.

G. K. 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.

G. K. Chesterton
As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

G. K. Chesterton