Jen > Jen's Quotes

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
― Brenda Ueland

“Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.”
― Robert Burns

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“He stopped and glared at her. “It’s a lifetime commitment in my book, lady. It’s not an arrangement you nullify when things get a little tough to bear.”
― Francine Rivers, Redeeming Love

“It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“I have been seized by the power of a great affection.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel