"The universe is a single jewel"

"FOR the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one."
 
~G.K. Chesterton:  Orthodoxy.

"The current cult of pleasure"

"A great deal of the current cult of pleasure, of luxury, of liberty in love, and all the rest of it, appears to me to be perfectly childish; and childish in the literal sense that it is greedy without any grasp of consequences."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, May 18, 1929.

"Dissolution of free thought"

"WHAT we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought: it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious big wigs to discuss what things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Orthodoxy.

"Man is not merely an evolution"

"THE matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it need only be noted that no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself. Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself. In other words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will. Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact. But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than if he were standing on his head."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man.

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"The rhinoceros"

“IT is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

"The sceptic’s ultimate skepticism"

"I will not engage in verbal controversy with the sceptic, because long experience has taught me that the sceptic’s ultimate skepticism is about the use of his own words and the reliability of his own intelligence."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News.

"Everybody speaks and nobody hears"

“THERE are any number of phrases which everybody speaks and nobody hears. There are any number of phrases which when they were used the first time may have meant something, and which are now used for the millionth time because they mean nothing."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, Aug. 31, 1929.