[An excerpt from a GKC essay with the paradoxical title (and thesis) "That an Irregular Expenditure Improves the Morals"]

I believe that a very irregular division, a very up and down life, a life lived in extremes of wealth and poverty is far the most moral and improving....For let us consider the two sides of the matter: the first is the necessity of the human spirit for some degree of abnegation, the second the necessity for some degree of excitement. Does the man of regular life learn abnegation? Not in the least. He has never tasted of extravagance and therefore does not miss it. He does not miss it, and therefore does not, properly speaking, give it up at all. If a thing is very remote indeed from a man's whole mode of life, as remote as a different century or continent, it is absurd to say that he renounces it. It is absurd to say that I am so simple in my mode of life that I have lived a year in Battersea without a gondola. It is nonsense to say that I think of my wife and my small income, and resist buying an Indian elephant....And now contrast with this easy and self-indulgent life of the respectable middle classes, the dark heroism, the iron self-sacrifice, the religious austerity of the extravagant man who is hard up. He passes temptations by, but like the saint in the Church Triumphant, he knows what they are, and what is their beauty and their pathos. He abandons the cigar, but not with ignorance, but with a sad and sacred knowledge. He is really an ascetic....And by the effect of his former extravagance on his present resources, he really gains a grip of himself, a knowledge of hard and wholesome human life, as it has been for all men since the beginning of the world.......I believe that a stricter and finer moral character is produced by being extravagant one day and parsimonious the next. For thus we develop both the Pagan and the Puritan virtues. And we keep the one essential of life, wonder; we know when we see it on the darkest night; the low and neglected hedge that lies between earth and elfland.

-March 14, 1903, Black and White

[found in the book Chesterton in Black and White (2021), edited by Geir Hasnes]