"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."
— G.K. Chesterton

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."
— G.K. Chesterton

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
— G.K. Chesterton

"People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
— G.K. Chesterton

"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you."
— Annie Dillard "The Writing Life"

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you."
— Annie Dillard

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. "
— Annie Dillard

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them"
— Annie Dillard

"It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick."
— Annie Dillard

""Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.""
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra "Don Quixote"

"Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell."
— C.S. Lewis

"That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing."
— Anthony Trollope

"Never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning."
— Anthony Trollope

"“A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.”"
— Susanna Clarke

"Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad"
— Christina Rossetti (Pre-Raphaelite Poetry: An Anthology)

"Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”"
— Augustine of Hippo (The Confessions of Saint Augustine)

"I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word."
— H.H. Munro (Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches)

""Know, then, that now, precisely now, these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet. It is our doing, but is it what you wanted? This sort of freedom?"
"Again I don't understand", Alyosha interrupted, "Is he being ironic? Is he laughing?"
"Not in the least. He precisely lays it to his and his colleagues' credit that they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.""
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy."
— Sarah Waters (Fingersmith)

"Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower