Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

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

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

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

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.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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.

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

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

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.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

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.