“No Catholic thinks he is a good Catholic; or he would by that thought become a bad Catholic. I for one am not even tempted to any illusion in that matter; I fear that very often, when I have got up early to go to Mass, I have said with a groan, Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, which, I may explain to the Moslem, is not a quotation from the Mass. But the critic here in question does not say, in the grand Lucretian manner, ‘Religion alone can persuade men to such evils.’”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly August 24, 1933, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)

“To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.”

George Santayana, as the header quotation on Chapter 64 in George Jonas Beethoven’s Mask

“always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”

Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday

“Laugh while you can still breathe.”

Another of mine, from March 2, 1989.

“All vulgar errors arise from education. The uneducated are generally right: the badly educated are always wrong.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 20, 1914, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)

“Every man who has knocked about the world knows that the real peculiarity of Catholicism is that it may turn up anywhere in the most incongruous social types. We are not surprised if a billiard-marker or a music-hall acrobat is a Catholic, though we might be fairly surprised if he were a Baptist; we are not surprised if a scavenger or a ratcatcher is a Catholic, though we might be if he were a Theosophist.”

G.K. Chesterton in English Life Jan. 1924, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)

“He broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.”

#3 in “Gilbert!’s Top 10 More Bad Puns” in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 6 #7 (June 2003)

“The chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached – ‘plain living and high thinking.’… They would be improved by high living and plain thinking. A little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility, a little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world.”

G.K. Chesterton Heretics