[With Lent coming up, I plan on refraining from updating this page until Easter (since, among other things, I plan on giving up reading Chesterton, with rare exceptions, for Lent). That being said, this will be my last update until then, and this seems an extremely appropriate quote for Lent.]

To live it is necessary to be born again, to be born again it is necessary to die. 

-January 21, 1905, Daily News

"Our Notebook" Column, by G.K. Chesterton
Illustrated London News, January 7, 1922

Once poetry and politics were great. Now they have been lopped from the tree only to rot on the ground or wither in the air. For the tree from which these fruits and flowers have been cut is that which our Northern forefathers worship, the Life-tree, Ygdrasil, whose branches take hold on heaven and whose fruit is the stars.

-The Outlook, Volume LVVVI (September to December 1905), quote found in article "G.K. Chesterton"

This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four legs; but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have five legs I am crushed.

-The Defendant (1901)

I mean the fact that the [his] rages, which are so ridiculous considered as rages, are perfectly intelligent and calculated considered as tricks.  That is a vital fact of modern government [...] The new cunning consists not in hiding the emotions, but in showing the sham emotions.  Familiarity is the instrument of falsity [...] We used to complain that rulers were reverenced as if they were more than human.  Our complaint may have been right; but we had not foreseen the filthy and ghastly results of being ruled by those who claim to be human, all too human.  We rebelled, and perhaps rightly, when a king was made stiff with gold and gems like an idol, and set on a throne as if it were an altar.  We are often tempted to-day to wish that the new ruler had the good manners of a stone image.  We wish he were as well-behaved as a wooden idol or even a wooden-headed king.

Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)