Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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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Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

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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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Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

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He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

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Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Criticism Quotes

The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.

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The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

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I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee.

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Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Kings Quotes , Men Quotes

If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.

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Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.

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Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.

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Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Encouragement Quotes , Waiting Quotes

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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Country Quotes , Money Quotes

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Atheist Quotes , Optimism Quotes

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

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Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.

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Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.

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Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

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