People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be.

People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.