...And the whole object of real art, of real romance - and, above all, of real religion - is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination. I mean the power to turn our imaginations inwards, on the things we already have, and to make those things live. It is not merely seeking new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences. It is really learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments. As it is, we are surrounded by a riot which is excused as the only way of being young, but which seems really to be a rapid way of growing old.

-September 20, 1924, Illustrated London News

...the only truly traditional tradition is one that is still a living thing.

-August 30, 1924, Illustrated London News

As a matter of fact, of course, all education is religious education- and never more than when it is irreligious education. It either teaches a definite doctrine about the universe, which is theology; or else it takes one for granted, which is mysticism. If it does not do that it does nothing at all, and means nothing at all, for everything must depend on first principles and refer to some causes, expressed or unexpressed.

-July 26, 1924, Illustrated London News

"....he is really a liberal and reasonable man. But by being perpetually in office he has let that pompous manner get worse and worse, till it seems to grow on him....What is needed in such a case?....A few healthful weeks... meditating on that fine shade of distinction between oneself and God Almighty, which is so easily overlooked."

-Four Faultless Felons (1930)

[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]

"Yes," said Hood, "your expert is very expert, isn't he- in writing books?" 

Sir Samuel Bliss stiffened in all his bristles. "I trust," he said "you are not implying any doubt that our expert is an expert." 

"I have no doubt of your expert," answered Hood gravely, "I do not doubt either that he is expert or that he is yours."

"Really, gentlemen," cried Bliss in a sort of radiance of protest, "I think such an insinuation about a man in Professor Hake's position---" 

 "Not at all, not at all," said Hood soothingly, "I'm sure it's a most comfortable position."

-Tales of the Long Bow (1925)