Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Death Quotes , Courage Quotes

When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.

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...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

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All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

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One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be.

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There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

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Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

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The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

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Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

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If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .

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There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Spring Quotes , Sunset Quotes

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

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Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.

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Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence, which cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America.

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We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

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All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

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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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When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.

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Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.

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