[Modern] social reform] is something much worse than giving all wealth to the Government. It is rather giving all government to the wealthy. It is arming plutocracy with bureaucracy.

-March 1,1919, Illustrated London News

If optimism means a general approval, it is certainly true that the more a man becomes an optimist the more he becomes a melancholy man. If he manages to praise everything, his praise will develop an alarming resemblance to a polite boredom. He will say that the marsh is as good as the garden; he will mean that the garden is as dull as the marsh. He may force himself to say that emptiness is good, but he will hardly prevent himself from asking what is the good of such good. This optimism does exist -- this optimism which is more hopeless than pessimism -- this optimism which is the very heart of hell. Against such an aching vacuum of joyless approval there is only one antidote -- a sudden and pugnacious belief in positive evil. This world can be made beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield. When we have defined and isolated the evil thing, the colours come back into everything else. When evil things have become evil, good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good. There are some men who are dreary because they do not believe in God; but there are many others who are dreary because they do not believe in the devil. The grass grows green again when we believe in the devil, the roses grow red again when we believe in the devil. 

No man was more filled with the sense of this bellicose basis of all cheerfulness than Dickens. He knew very well the essential truth, that the true optimist can only continue an optimist so long as he is discontented. For the full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything, we have missed something -- war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

The great strength of Christian sanctity has always been simply this - that the worst enemies of the saints could not say of the saints anything worse than they said of themselves. It is disheartening to go on abusing a man while he is quite unconscious of your presence, but is in a low and furious undertone abusing himself. This has always been the strong point of even the most commonplace Christianity. Suppose the village Atheist had a sudden and splendid impulse to rush into the village church and denounce everybody there as miserable offenders. It was always quite possible that he might break in at the exact moment when they were saying the same thing themselves. You can say anything against a man who praises himself, but a man who blames himself is invulnerable.

-October 12, 1907, Illustrated London News

The truth is that our public life consists almost exclusively of small men. Our public men are small because they have to prove that they are in the commonplace interpretation clever, because they have to pass examinations, to learn codes of manners, to imitate a fixed type. It is in private life that we find the great characters. They are too great to get into the public world. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a great man to enter into the kingdoms of the earth. The truly great and gorgeous personality, he who talks as no one else could talk and feels with an elementary fire, you will never find this man on any cabinet bench, in any literary circle, at any society dinner. Least of all will you find him in artistic society; he is utterly unknown in Bohemia. He is more than clever, he is amusing. He is more than successful, he is alive. You will find him stranded here and there in all sorts of unknown positions, almost always in unsuccessful positions. You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like Micawber. You will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks, like Swiveller. You will find him as an unsuccessful actor, like Crummles. You will find him as an unsuccessful doctor, like Sawyer. But you will always find this rich and reeking personality where Dickens found it -- among the poor. For the glory of this world is a very small and priggish affair, and these men are too large to get in line with it. They are too strong to conquer.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

"We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand."

When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign than France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinating rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveler himself the almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than in countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox that is one of the great truths of travel.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading long into it our own character. If when we see an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some light on the truth.

-What I Saw in America (1922)

What a cat really wants is a riddle as ancient as what the Sphinx really means.

-November 21, 1912, New Witness

"..it uses Spring as a symbol of Easter; not Easter as a symbol of spring."

Christians and all inhabitors of the ancient culture feel that Spring is the symbol of Easter. Materialists, notably all sorts of atheist anthropologists, hold that Easter was only the symbol of Spring. Professors of folk-lore insisted that primitive men (with whom they seemed to be on very intimate terms) had made up a rather unnatural masquerade of myth, merely to cover the natural facts of experience. They concealed the fact that the flowers return, under the parable of a god returning. By the time that commonsense began to pluck up courage to question what were called the Conclusions of Science, it became apparent that there were a good many questions which Science could not answer; and a good many points on which her conclusions were anything but conclusive. Why should anyone want to cover up ordinary facts with an extraordinary story? Why should anybody think he could keep the grass a secret, by the invention of a grass-god? And why could not primitive men be primitive enough to leave plain facts as they were? Was it not much more natural to imagine flowers or foliage as ornaments for a god or hero, than to imagine a hollow idol invented only to stand between men and flowers? Is it not more sane to say that the visible renewal of the earth gives hints or signs to those who already believe in heaven?.......There is nothing but nonsense, therefore, in all pretences that the mere round of Nature itself is the source of our highest hopes; or could by itself have evolved all that is meant by Resurrection. It is the soul that has received an unspeakable secret from heaven, which it can only express in images of the earth; and naturally expresses in terms of the temporary resurrections of the earth. In other words, it uses Spring as a symbol of Easter; not Easter as a symbol of Spring.

March 26, 1932, G.K.'s Weekly

...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]