Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

"But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure."

"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite."

"The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland."

"For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name."

"It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything-- even pride."

"Mr. Belloc, 'Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night:  it is already morning.' "

"And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about."

"Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain."

"Falling in love is more poetical that dropping in to poetry."

"The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales."

"Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense"

"Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads."

"I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts."

"For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony."

"It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our  Farther is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE."