“To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman – she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run…. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World

“In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic; now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.”

G.K. Chesterton, as header quotation on inaugural column by Brent Forrest, who was a professional magician, not further attributed, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“It is impossible to caricature that which caricatures itself.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 16, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Eternal Revolution” in Orthodoxy quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“A fool and his money are soon partying.”

“Tagline from the Internet” quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)

“One of the ancient Greek philosophers is credited with the statement: ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well.’”

James Buchanan What Should Economists Do? but beware the attribution because my notes also contain “‘Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.’ - Earl of Chesterfield, 1746” [D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”] and “it was said of Nicholas Poussin, the painter, that the rule of his conduct was, that ‘whatever was worth doing at all was worth doing well;’” [Samuel Smiles Self-Help]

“Finally, there is the great passage in ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ where Chesterton suggests that the sun may rise in response to God saying ‘Do it again,’ each day. One of our Chesterton Academy students responded to this passage in her senior capstone essay by saying, ‘This claim is supported by the fact that the sun refused to shine on the day men killed God.’”

Joshua Russell, “Headmaster at Chesterton Academy of the Sacred Heart in Peoria, Illinois” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“A joke can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Dickens Period” in Charles Dickens, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)