Gilbert K. Chesterton

"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."

"A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."

"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks."

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling."

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past."

"All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die."

"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."

"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."

"Half a truth is better than no politics."

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."

"I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles."

"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."

"Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all."

"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."

"Marriage is an adventure, like going to war."

"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache."

"No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete."

"Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich."

"The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself."

"The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it."

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

"The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."

"To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it."

"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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."

"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."

"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"

"Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."

"Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes."