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A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

Morality is always dreadfully complicated to a man who has lost all his principles.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all of its conquerors.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

To love means loving the unlovable.
To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable.
Faith means believing the unbelievable.
Hope means hoping when everything is hopeless.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

Reason and Faith

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. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation or deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?’ The young sceptic says. ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.’

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy  <link>

The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.

G.K. Chesterton  <link>

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

He who marries the spirit of the times will soon be a widower.

— G.K. Chesterton  <link>

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

— G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England [via]  <link>