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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
Biographer
Crime Writer
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Historian
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Things
Settled
Function
Strange
Imagination
Much
Make

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I am myself so exceedingly Nordic, as far as physical constitution is concerned, that I can enjoy almost any weather except what is called glorious weather. At the end of a few days, I am left wondering how the men of the Mediterranean ever managed to do almost all the most active and astonishing things that have been done.
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It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.
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If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
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Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
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Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
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. . . For friendship implies individuality whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two but comrades are the better for being two million.
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I will not call it my philosophy for I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me.
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A naked moon stood in a naked sky.
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children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.
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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.
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All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
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If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.
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A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
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Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.
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There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
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True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
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Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.
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The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.
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The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.
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The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
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