Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Things are simple, it is us human beings that make it difficult.

I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

My life can be insanely complicated sometimes, and there's a certain simplicity that I crave.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

Nature's way is simple and easy, but men prefer the intricate and artificial.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

Last night I had a dream. When I got to Africa, I had one hell of a rumble. I had to beat Tarzan's behind first, for claiming to be King of the Jungle.

Demon, angel, all the same thing if you go back far enough, or cut deep enough.

Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction - the coincidencia apositorum. That’s what we really feel, not these rational schemes that are constantly beating us over the head with the “thou shalts” and “thou should”, but rather a recovery of the real ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing.

There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

What a curious creature is man; with what a variety of powers and faculties is he endued; yet how easily is he disturbed and put out of order.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Bhuta ia, dewa ia. (Bali expression meaning Man is a demon, man is a god.)

Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.

You know, you’re a little complicated after all.” “Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.

We should not lose ourselves in vainglorious sohemes for changing human nature all over the planet. Rather, we should learn to view ourselves with a sense of proportion and Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given us to live.

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.

People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day.

There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.

Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied that they know. To the common man the great problems are easy. He has no trouble in accounting for the universe. He can tell you the origin and destiny of man and the why and wherefore of things.