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The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

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.
Life
Pleasure
Requires
Purification
Fact
Stones
Weeds
Facts
Laughter
Unnoticed
Else
Gratitude
Spell
Past
Bird
Spells
Anything
Discipline
Weed
Even
Necessary
Sunset
Storehouse
Mind
Education
Appreciation
Austerity

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Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.
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Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.
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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.
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The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.
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Thanks are the highest form of thought.
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The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
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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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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
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Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
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The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.
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For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the Calvinist.
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If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.
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Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.
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Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.
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The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
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And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
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Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.
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The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
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You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.
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Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.
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