Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

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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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Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.

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In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.

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The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

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You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

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If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.

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There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

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When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

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In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

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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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For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

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There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.

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The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

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Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".

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Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

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Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

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There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.

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If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

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The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

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