The sin of sentimentalism only occurs when somebody indulges a feeling, sometimes even a real feeling, to the prejudice of something equally real, which also has it's rights.

-August 10, 1927, Illustrated London News

"..the inevitable result of love, which is incarnation; and the inevitable result of incarnation, which is crucifixion..."

The final decision of Peter Pan was a bad example of having it both ways. What is really wrong with that delightful masterpiece is that the master asked a question and ought to have answered it. But he could not bring himself to answer it- or rather, he tried to say "yes" and "no" in one word. A very fine problem of poetic philosophy might be presented as the problem of Peter Pan. He is represented as a sort of everlasting elf, a child who never changes age after age, but who in this story falls in love with a little girl who is a normal person. He is given his choice between becoming normal with her or remaining immortal without her, and either choice might have been made a fine and effective thing. He might have said that he was a god- that he loved all, but could not live for any; that he belonged not to them but to multitudes of unborn babes. Or he might have chosen love, with the inevitable result of love, which is incarnation; and the inevitable result of incarnation, which is crucifixion- yes, if it were only crucifixion by becoming a clerk in a bank and growing old. But it was the fork of the road; and even in fairyland you cannot walk down two roads at once. The one real fault of sentimentalism in this fairy play is the compromise that is ultimately made, whereby he shall go free for ever, but meet his human friend once a year. Like most practical compromises, it is the most unpractical of all possible courses of action. Even the baby in that nursery could have seen that Wendy would be ninety in no time, after what would appear to her immortal lover a mere idle half-hour.

-August 20, 1927, Illustrated London News

Chesterton in a letter to Mrs. John Lane, writing concerning a group called "The Peckham Ethical Fellowship":

Isn't it too beautiful? I'm sure they come out of a book. I only wish they'd go back into it.

[quoted in G.K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker, p. 139]

Sorry, but that made me laugh, so I had to share it for some light-hearted fun. :-)

[...] the basest of pleasures [is] the pleasure of being pained [...] the pleasure of being shocked, the pleasure of being censorious- in a word, the pleasure of scandal.

-August 18, 1923, Illustrated London News

At its noblest [the humanitarian cause] meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature. [...] Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider’s web of pity.  This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the theological conception of the special divinity of man.  For the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.

Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort; such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

[...] Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which has, as it were, truncated and made meagre the work of many brilliant modern novelists. Modern novelists try to make long novels out of subtle characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, because it works in and in to its own centre and dies there. But a simple character goes on for ever in a fresh interest and energy, because it works out and out into the infinite universe.

-Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911)

Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before he could bring out a word.

"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this——"

"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the ship.

"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the river."

Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.

"Is that story really true?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world [...]"

-The Ball and the Cross (1909)

Incidentally, here is a link to Pope John Paul I commenting on this very passage

Indeed the vulgar rumour is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the "educated" opinion of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion.

-A Short History of England (1917)

" [...] you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them."

"Did you think there was nothing but evil at the bottom of them?" he asked, gently. "Did you think I had found nothing but filth in the deep seas into which fate has thrown me? Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them [...] I tell you it is as true of these rich fools and rascals as it is true of every poor footpad and pickpocket; that only God knows how good they have tried to be. God alone knows what the conscience can survive, or how a man who has lost his honor will still try to save his soul."

-The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922)

A reactionary [...] means a conservative in revolt

-Introduction to Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle (1909)

Nothing is more striking (to anyone who feels the Bible as a live thing) than the contrast between the careless commonsense with which Christ and His Apostles admit the need of rulers and the mysterious and authoritative violence with which they declare that the mighty shall be plucked from their seat and the rich shut out of the Kingdom. There is mere light reasonableness in Christ's tone towards the tribute to Caesar. 'Look at a penny for yourself; after all, Caesar mints them; give the man the benefit of the work he does in the world.' There is the same practical tone in St. Paul about the magistrate; 'He beareth not the sword in vain.' That is exactly what a sane mystic does feel about the magistrate; 'After all, he's not there for nothing; there must be some sense in the human tradition of civil obedience.' It is in a very different tone, a tone of apocalyptic truth and terrible reality, that they speak of the spiritual state of rulers, damned in the purple and fine linen or eaten by their gold as by fire. It is arguably Christian to say that wealth and leisure are necessary for a State, but not that they are good for a soul. A Christian might say that the rich we have always with us. But it is not Christian to say that they are anything but a necessary evil. Put not your trust in princes even if you obey them.

-July 17, 1909, Daily News

George Orwell, commenting on Chesterton and Belloc:

Many earlier writers have foreseen the emergence of a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon Slavery...A good example is Hilaire Belloc's book, The Servile State, published in 1911 [sic]...The remedy he suggests, [a return to small-scale peasant ownership] is for many reasons impossible; still it does foretell with remarkable insight the kind of things that have been happening from about 1930 onwards. Chesterton, in a less methodical way, predicted the disappearance of democracy and private property, and the rise of a slave society which might be called either capitalist or Communist.'

[quoted by Fr. Ian Boyd in his book The Novels of G.K. Chesterton, p. 204. The quote is from Orwell's essay "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution"]