Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.

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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

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Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

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Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

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America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

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Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

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The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.

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We're all in the same boat, and we're all seasick.

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With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

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Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

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That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon. There are certain intellectuals who are too bright to be content with merely praising peace but who are infuriated by anybody praising war. If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance

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The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

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A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.

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Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.

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A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

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...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

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It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

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We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

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