Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

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Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.

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There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

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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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White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

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Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.

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People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , People Quotes , Mad Quotes

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , School Quotes , Mind Quotes

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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Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Christian Quotes , Wisdom Quotes

How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

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Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

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Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

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The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.

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A naked moon stood in a naked sky.

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The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

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

When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

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What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

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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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Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass.

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