The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]

The hardest thing to remember about our own time, of course, is simply that it is a time; we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment.

But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever.

And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.

This is the only final greatness of a man; that he does for all the world what all the world cannot do for itself. Dickens, I believe, did it.

none of us could have conceived such a thing, that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.

This is, indeed, the strongest argument for the religious conception of life. If the dignity of man is an earthly dignity we shall be tempted to deny his earthly degradation. If it is a heavenly dignity we can admit the earthly degradation

Evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man.

If optimism means a general approval, it is certainly true that the more a man becomes an optimist the more he becomes a melancholy man.

This is the real gospel of Dickens; the inexhaustible opportunities offered by the liberty and the variety of man.