Moses Each’s Reviews > In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton > Status Update

“Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get for a halfpenny. I make exception, of course, of the sun, the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get them for nothing.”

Chesterton on a jury:

“Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men…But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”

“If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offense.” @crunchy__people

“For in taking things out of my own pocket I had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief; I had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a tidy person.”

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”