Notre Dame is not a myth. Notre Dame is not a theory. Its interest does not spring from ignorance but from knowledge; from a culture complicated with a hundred controversies and revolutions. It is not featureless, but carved into an incredible forest and labyrinth of fascinating features, any one of which we could talk about for days. It is not great because there is little of it, but great because there is a great deal of it [...] Notre Dame, on its merely human side, is mediaeval civilization.

-Fancies Versus Fads (1923)

Antonin Scalia and GKC

From an article by the son of the late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia concerning his father:

He didn’t only evangelize by example, though. Dad rarely subjected us to lectures, thank goodness, but he was happy to explain things and answer questions about the finer points of Christianity. He would also occasionally pull my siblings and me aside and tell us about his favorite prayers or call us into his study and read passages from his favorite writers – John Henry Cardinal Newman, G.K. Chesterton, or C.S. Lewis – or share magazines and articles that he thought would nourish our spiritual lives. [Source]

[M]an creates in his capacity of the image of God; and he is in nothing so much the image of God as in creating images.

-November 23, 1929, Illustrated London News

[H]aving taken the frivolous things seriously we naturally take the serious things frivolously.

-August 25, 1906, Illustrated London News

We in a certain Western tradition have erected a thing, the toils and trivialities of which we know only too well, but which we are still prepared dogmatically to defend, a thing called public law. [...] all good things live in the light and in the air of truth. Sooner or later State secrets will be tainted with treason; sooner or later private prisons will be filled with torture. The only cure is daylight; even if it be such dreary daylight as creeps at morning along the corridors of a law court. [...] the citizen of Western Christendom upholds the huge, the perilous, and the noble experiment of publicity.

-April 22. 1911, Daily News

"I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern."

A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood.

-Autobiography (1936)

[P]rogress ought to be based on principle [...] our modern progress is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice.

-What's Wrong With the World (1910)

[...] Eugenics is chiefly a denial of the Declaration of Independence. It urges that so far from all men being born equal, numbers of them ought not to be born at all.

-November 20, 1915, Illustrated London News

Joseph Conrad and GKC

An interesting piece of information:

A few years later, Frances received a letter from [Joseph] Conrad's widow to say that her husband, who had died in 1924, had 'always' been a 'great admirer' of Chesterton and that it had been 'of no little regret' to him that he had not known Chesterton personally

-G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, Ian Ker, (2011), p. 572

Al Capone and GKC

The following anecdote from Chesterton's trip to Italy is quite interesting (and which I have mentioned before, but found a new source confirming it):

While Dorothy Collins [GKC's secretary] had been taking Chesterton's dictation or Gilbert was visiting or lecturing, Frances [GKC's wife] was sometimes at a loose end. Fortunately, a fellow guest in the hotel, a pleasant American gentleman with a very large Packard limousine and his own chauffeur, was happy to put his car at Frances' disposal when it was not needed by himself. Gilbert would no doubt have been delighted in the chauffeur's name, Dominic Cinderella, but it would have been interesting to have been able to note his reaction when some time later, after may kindnesses by the American, Frances introduced nice Mr. Capone to Gilbert: Alphone Capone was perhaps enjoying a quiet holiday after all the excitement of the previous February's St Valentine's Day massacre.

-G.K. Chesterton: A Reappraisal, Denis J. Conlin (2015), p. 198

The truth is that a phrase can be falsified by use without being false in fact.

-The Uses of Diversity (1921)

A joke is always a thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally thoughtless.

-The Uses of Diversity (1921)