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Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.

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.
Evil
Blessing
Decline
Doe
Tired
Cure
Reason
Longer
Feed
Work
Joy
Cures
Good
Food
Bless
Things
Suffering
Begins
Pessimism
Lying
Refuse
Weary
Society
Despair
Blessings

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White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
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The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.
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The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.
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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.
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The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.
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Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.
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The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
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The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal and it is right for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
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The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
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You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
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Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.
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What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.
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Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
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I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
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Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.
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The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
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Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
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Comradeship is obvious and universal and open but it is only one kind of affection it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal.
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All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.
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Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Gilbert K. Chesterton