Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

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The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

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The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Truth Quotes , Men 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 criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

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You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

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There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

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The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

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You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.

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There is no bigot like the atheist.

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For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

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The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.

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I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Earth Quotes

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

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Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

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Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.

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It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

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Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.

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If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Squares Quotes