Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

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Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

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The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

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Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

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No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.

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Boys like romantic [fairy] tales; but babies like realistic tales - because they find them romantic...This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost prenatal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

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But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

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Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.

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The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Style Quotes

A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet.

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Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

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But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

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To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.

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Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

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Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

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Americans have a taste for…rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased.

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The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.

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Before the Roman came to Rye or out to severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

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Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

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