Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.

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

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Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.

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It seems to me,' said the other, 'That you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.' By George!' said Syme facing round and looking at him, 'What a clever chap you are!

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But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

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The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

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The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.

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No man can be merry unless he is serious.

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An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

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When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.

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The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

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

I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

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Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

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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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Silence is the unbearable repartee.

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All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

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Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

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Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

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This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Progress Quotes , Age Quotes

To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

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