Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced

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For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

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The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.

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The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

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In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.

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Every politician is emphatically a promising politician.

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St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.

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A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

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We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

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Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.

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The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

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

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Believe Quotes , Artist Quotes

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

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Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.

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I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.

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Sticking to one woman is a small price to pay for so much as having seen one woman.

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This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Real Quotes , Believe Quotes

Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.

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Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

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All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

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