Gilbert K. Chesterton

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

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

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

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

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.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

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.