Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

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A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.

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One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

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Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

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Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.

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Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

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The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

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As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

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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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For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

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Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.

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We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.

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Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

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But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

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I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.

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Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.

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One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

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(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

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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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Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

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