Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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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It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. They can't see the problem if they are looking in the wrong place. They can't see the problem if they have blinders on - for 'none are so blind as those that will not see'.

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If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

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Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

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The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

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It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

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It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.

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We can’t turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

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The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

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I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

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I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

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And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.

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There are two kinds of rebellion. The first is one in which the slave demands something that the tyrant has got. The second is one in which he demands something that the tyrant has not got.

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Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.

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The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

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Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

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Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

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Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.

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Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

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He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

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