25 Thoughts From G.K Chesterton on Love, Life & Faith
“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
“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.”
“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”
“Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”
“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”
“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”
“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”
“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
“Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”