Gilbert Keith Chesterton: Frasi in inglese (pagina 12)

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

“The reason that angels can fly is that they take themselves so lightly.”

“Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.”

“Round the birth of "Pickwick" broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens.... He turned people into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes.”

“We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small. When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.”

“One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.”

“Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.”

“For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.... It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”