Laughter and Love

The equal and eternal human being... sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes in the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend... We have been too long separated; let us go out together... Let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is already day.

'The Napoleon of Notting Hill.'

Via Chesterton Day by Day