Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

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

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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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All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

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London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

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One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

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Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

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Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

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A faith is that which is able to survive a mood.

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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 child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

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The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

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It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.

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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

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There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.

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Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

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All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

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Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.

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All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Real Quotes , Men Quotes