I doubt if anyone of any ...

I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...
I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...
 Gilbert K. Chesterton

Quotes from the same author

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
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 Gilbert K. Chesterton
A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.
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 Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.
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 Gilbert K. Chesterton
The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.
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 Gilbert K. Chesterton
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
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 Gilbert K. Chesterton