Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?

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Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

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The center of every man's existence is a dream.

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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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Shouldn't atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?

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We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

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A third-class carriage is a community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits.

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Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.

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I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution.

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There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

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Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.

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The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

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But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

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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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It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

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My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.

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The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

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Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!

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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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An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

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