Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

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

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.

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Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.

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You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

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Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Flower Quotes , Dark Quotes

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

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Men rush toward complexity; but yearn for simplicity.

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Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.

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We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

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Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

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I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

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Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

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The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

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Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

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...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

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If our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.

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When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

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Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Morning Quotes , Night Quotes

It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

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