Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is.

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[A pacifist is] the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society.

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He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

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It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

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One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

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I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

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The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

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I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

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Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

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Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.

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It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

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There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

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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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Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

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Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

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The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

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

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Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

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The only defensible war is a war of defense.

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The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.

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