Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

...but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Lonely Quotes , Children Quotes

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

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Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.

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One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be.

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Every politician is emphatically a promising politician.

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Ignorance Quotes , Poetic Quotes

It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

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

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

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I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

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I may not practice what I preach but God forbid I should preach what I practice

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Love Quotes , Hate Quotes

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Morality Quotes , States Quotes

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

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

There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical...It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry...the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

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The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

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Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god — and always like a god.

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[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.

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...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

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

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

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You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

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