It is in the private life that we find the great characters. They are too great to get into the public world.

More from G.K. Chesterton

• All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
• His English education at one of the great public schools had preserved his intellect perfectly and permanently at the stage of boyhood.
• It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
• What the denouncer of dogma really means is not that dogma is bad; but rather that dogma is too good to be true.