Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

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The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

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The old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.

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We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.

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Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

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The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.

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Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.

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When "everyone knows" that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads.

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The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

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Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

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The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

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The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

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Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

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Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.

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A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

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The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

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That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

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I've searched all the parks in all the cities - and found no statues of Committees.

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