Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

Love: It will kill you and save you, both

Pleasure itself is painful at the bottom.

I'm a lover and a fighter.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

Everybody knows someone like that: wonderful, attractive people full of passion and ideals. You envy them, but you know there's a dark side, which is brutal and cruel and violent. That dark side informs what's wonderful about them, and the passion and rage inform the darkness; they're inseparable.

I like the concept of 'have your cake and eat it, too.'

London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Everything that kills me , makes me feel alive

My only love sprung from my only hate.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

What appeals to you the most is the very thing that will drive you crazy

If ice can burn, then love and hate can mate.

Memory. My poison, my food.

You can't have good without evil, pleasure without pain, and so on.

The wheel and the brake have different duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another.

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not.

There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.

The tension of opposites: Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.

Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin, As sweet as clover-honey in its cell; Love is the password whereby souls get in To Heaven--the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell.

What I love I destroy. What I destroy, I love.

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.

The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?