Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.

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When "everyone knows" that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads.

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Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

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If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

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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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Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

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The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

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Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

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

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Mother Quotes , Essence Quotes

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

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Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

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There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

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The moderns do not realize modernity.

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The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

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Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

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There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.

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A yawn is a silent shout.

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Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

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I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

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

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Past Quotes , Important Quotes