Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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

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Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Class Quotes

...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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The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.

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Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

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'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

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Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

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It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.

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A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.

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Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

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It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

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Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.

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Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

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All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

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If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple.

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We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

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There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

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We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.

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It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

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The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

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