K. Chesterton

K. Chesterton
love beautiful two
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.
son boys men
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
morality states forbidden
It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.
america independence pieces
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
running men important
Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.
writing good-times easier
It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.
stars children blow
If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse
faith stars real
It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.
faith real inspiration
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house - this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.
faith inspiration men
Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.
faith inspiration common-sense
A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.
faith inspiration men
A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.
faith inspiration men
Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.
faith inspiration long
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... "It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here", repeating itself eternally.