Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

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The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.

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It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

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We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

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It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

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Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

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...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

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If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue.

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To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.

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It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

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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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I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.

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The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

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Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

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All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

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Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.

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I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

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Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.

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Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

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I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

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