Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

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Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.

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America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

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Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

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We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.

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Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".

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There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

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Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

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There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

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Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

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Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

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A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.

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We are all ordinary people. And it's the extraordinary people Who know it.

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Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

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Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!

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Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

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A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

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Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

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