“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

This quotation is hard to source because it seems to originate with Roger Sessions in 1950. But Sessions said Einstein had said it "in effect" and since then it has been very widely attributed to Einstein because who ever heard of Roger Sessions (I hadn’t; turns out he was a composer) whereas Einstein’s the guy with the giant brain and hairdo to match. The Quote Investigator says while Einstein did express this idea at various times it is probably Sessions who, while deflecting the credit, actually created the concise, beloved and much quoted version above.

“Strangely bad reasoning: ‘God hasn’t stopped human beings from committing evil. Therefore I withdraw my faith from God and place it in human beings instead.’”

J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" email Feb. 25, 2019.

“If the real girl is experiencing a real romance, she is experiencing something old, but not something stale.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Real Problem with Sentimental Art” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6

“To say that something is ‘natural’ means not that it is inevitable, but that the potential for it exists in the genotype. This in turn implies that it is merely prudent to bear in mind the potential of that ‘natural’ behavior and act accordingly. [Robert] Wright approvingly cites Francis Bacon, who announced, ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.’”

Lionel Tiger reviewing Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny in National Review March 6, 2000

“I have also never met a successful pessimist.”

William J. O’Neill, cited in The American Spectator August 1988

“It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the spat in France over whether to stick a monstrous modern spire on a restored Notre Dame cathedral reflects a civilization that, cut off from tradition, has lost the ability to believe in anything.

“A strange strand of eternal pathos runs through dreams which comes from the very loom of life itself. Dreams are, if I may so express it, like life only more so. Dreams, like life, are full of nobility and joy utterly arbitrary and incalculable. We have gratitude, but never certainty.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Meaning of Dreams,” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)