“How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? ... how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?” - GK Chesterton

Hitting the precise note as he does

“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.”

“I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.”

“The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.”

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.”

“To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. ... The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

Hard not to think of our current political climate

Madness is pathological certainty.

“The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.”

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. ...

The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.”

“Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.”