Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

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According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

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Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.

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Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

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Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

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The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

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If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?

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The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

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There nearly always is a method in madness.

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To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

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We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

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There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

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One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

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We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

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There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

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No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

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

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The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

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Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

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No man can be merry unless he is serious.

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