Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.

I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen.

That's the great paradox of living on this earth, that in the midst of great pain you can have great joy as well. If we didn't have those things we'd just be numb.

Life at best is bittersweet.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

Everything I do is a reflection of the duality within me. Musically, I really love things that are very synthetic and unnatural. And I also like the organic and human... the intrinsic, I guess.

The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?

I have been blessed with a good, fun, and wonderful life, but I've also seen a whole lot of pain.

I believe in joy, but I believe in the flip-side, agony.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

For everything that you find dreadful, there's usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

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 think if you know one direction, then you can feel the other one. I don't think you can be truly, insanely joyous if you haven't ever felt the flip side of it.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.

Next to the highest peak of happiness, there’s the deepest gap of pain.

I'm drawn between the light and dark.

Monarch of earth, I shall confess my secret craft: I've always fought to purify wild flame to light, and kindle whatever light I found to burst in flame.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

To deny the darkness of the soul is to be but half a human being. But we had both sides.

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

The core of the seen and unseen universe smiles, but remember smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter.

You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.