The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]

What such engines, in such size and multiplicity, really meant was this: they meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities; they mea

Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away from despotism.

These things have got into the region of farce; and should be dealt with farcically, not even ferociously.

This is the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine. Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man’s head is not better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to cure it. And it is the same if a man is in revolt, even a morbid revolt. Taking the heart out of him by slavery is not better than le

This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us.

A man’s soul is as full of voices as a forest; there are ten thousand tongues there like all the tongues of the trees: fancies, follies, memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes. All the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some of those voices have authority and others not.

The majority of men are poets, only they happen to be bad poets.

They have an exhilarating consciousness that they could make the sun and moon better; but they also have the depressing consciousness that they could not make the sun and moon at all.

He was perfectly right, of course, when one comes to think of it, in holding that it was physically impossible for a street to defeat a city.