Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

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If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.

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Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

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You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?

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The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

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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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But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

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Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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. . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

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To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

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The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

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There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical...It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry...the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

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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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No sane person, I hope, would accuse me of saying that every Distributist must drink beer; especially if he could brew his own cider or found claret better for his health. But I do most emphatically scorn and scout the vulgar refinement that regards beer as something unseemly and humiliating. And I would shout the name of beer a hundred times a day, to shock all the snobs who have so shameful a sense of shame.

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Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

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Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains.

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A crown of roses is also a crown of thorns.

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A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

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Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

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In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

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