Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

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There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

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All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

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Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

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Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

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We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

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Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is: what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problems of the modern novel is: what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Hero Quotes , Book Quotes

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

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There nearly always is a method in madness.

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With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

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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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Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

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Truths turn into dogmas the minute they are disputed.

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I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee.

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Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.

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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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What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Writing Quotes , Long Quotes

It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.

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The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

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The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.

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