I am a vegetarian... between meals. From breakfast to lunch, not a leg of mutton crosses my lips. During all that time I am an earnest and active nutarian, munching away and laying up stores of health.

There are only two ways of governing human beings: the first is called dogmatism and the second despotism. But despotism is easier. For if men are ruled by a king they can forget him; if they are ruled by a creed they have to remember it.

Pleasure in the beautiful is a sacred thing.

A work of art is like a prayer; no sin must be kept back in it, or it becomes false.

In our time we find a great deal of religion in art. In former ages we found a great deal of art in religion. Religion was the orthodoxy of those days: art has become almost the only orthodoxy of these.

Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of Christianity. But it is the ancient Church that can again startle the world with the paradoxes of Christianity.

I could never see why a man who is not free to open his mouth to drink should be free to open it to talk. Talking does far more direct harm to other people.

Great joy has in it the sense of immortality: the triumphant moments of our life may have been only moments, but they were moments of eternity.

All skepticism is like seasickness... If you cannot enjoy the universe, it is better to throw it up; but it will leave you weak and sensitive and any spirit that you touch will infallibly fly to your head.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

Half our human effort is wasted on mere transit, transport, and exchange. The commonwealth is a clearinghouse of cases we never open and presents we never enjoy.

It seems to me this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment.

It is vain to learn to enjoy sport, or to enjoy art, or to enjoy festivity, if we have not learned the fundamental function—how to enjoy enjoyment.

The very definition of hell must be energy without joy.

Our particular corner of Christendom can now be taught the history of every civilisation except its own.

There certainly are great important matters upon which many of the great and important religions agree. But the first difficulty is that these are sometimes the very things with which the unifiers of religions disagree.

While we are seeing around us a degree of licence that can rightly be called pagan, we are also seeing a destruction of liberty that is rightly called Puritan. What is bottled up in one place breaks out in another place; only it is the wrong place instead of the right place.

Sociology really does mean waiting in a wild place for something that won't happen.

It is a moral duty to listen to reason, but it is not a moral duty to listen to unreason.

It takes a real politician to say that politics don't matter.

I do not believe that a nation dies save by suicide. To the very last every problem is a problem of will; and if we will we can be whole. But it involves facing our own failures as well as counting our successes.

We have seen the end of the age of Reason; and that we live in the age of Suggestion. Perhaps for the first time, the degradation of Man has been openly declared; in a theory that he can be persuaded without being convinced.

The Church does not crush any man's conscience. It is the man who crushes his conscience and then finds out that it was right, when he has almost forgotten that he had one.

Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things—to blink in a blinding light or laugh when tickled. That is the best of Christmas—it is a startling and disturbing happiness; an uncomfortable comfort.

The idea of embodying goodwill—that is, of putting it into a body—is the huge and primal idea of the Incarnation. A gift of God that can be seen and touched is the whole point of the epigram of the creed. Christ Himself was a Christmas present.

Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind—the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. We are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones.

Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly. He is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold.

As a child I faced a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. >>

The essence of real ritual is that one does something because it signifies something; it may be stiff or slow or ceremonial in form; that depends on the nature of the artistic form. But he does it because it is significant. It is the essence of routine that he does it because it is insignificant.

It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.

The forms and rites of Christmas Day are meant to give the last push to people who are afraid to be festive. Father Christmas exists to haul us out of bed and make us partake of meals too beautiful to be called breakfasts, to fling us out of the bathing-machine into the heady happiness of the sea.

Winter is based upon a contrast — between the fire and wine within the house and the winter and the roaring rains without. It is far more poetical, because there is in it a note of defense, almost of war; a note of being besieged by the snow and hail; of making merry in the belly of a fort.

Modern theology will tell us the Child of Bethlehem is only an abstraction of all children; that the mother from Nazareth is a metaphysical symbol of motherhood. The truth is that it is only because the Nativity is a narrative of one lonely and literal mother and child that it is universal to all.

All our fairy-tales, and even all our appetite for fairy-tales, draw their fire from one central fairy-tale, as all forgeries draw their significance from a signature. This [Bethlehem] fable is a fact, and the other fables cannot really be appreciated even as fables until we know it is a fact.

In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

The return of old things in new times is the permanent security of men who like to be sane. The greatest of all blessings is the boomerang. To have such an institution as Christmas is to make an adventure recurrent—and therefore, to make an adventure everlasting.

In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. . . I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a storyteller.

This world may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false.

The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers... I can make the future as narrow as myself. The past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity.

Children still understand the feast of Christmas. There is nothing frivolous about their attitude to a stocking or a Christmas tree. Children have the serious and even solemn sense of the great truth -- that Christmas is a time when things happen... things that do not always happen.

[The cavern is] an outpost, a piercing through rock and an entrance into enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as King Herod felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. Day 20 💙📚 #booksky #books @gkchesterton.bsky.social

All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapor from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago.

Real fun is to have limited materials and a good idea. What is really funny about Christmas charades in any average home is the contrast between commonplace resources and one comic idea. What is deadly dull about the millionaire-banquets is the contrast between colossal resources and no idea.

It is to peasants that we owe the survival of nearly all the jokes and games that occupy children in any middle-class house at Christmas. The idea of a Merry Christmas was maintained much more faithfully by the ragged carol-singers than by the Merry Gentlemen to whom they sang their carols.

The discordance or discomfort complained of by modern critics, in the family reunion, is not due to that mystical focal fire having been left burning, but to its having been left to go cold.

Christmas presupposes the possibility of people being... forced to face an hour in the society of an uncle or aunt they do not like. It was never supposed that Parents were included in the great democratic abstraction called People. It was never supposed that brotherhood could extend to brothers.

Most sensible people say that adults cannot be expected to appreciate Christmas as much as children appreciate it. But I am not sure that even sensible people are always right. It may be because I am silly, but relatively to the rest of the year, I enjoy Christmas more than I did when I was a child.

Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it.

No other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem.