Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

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The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

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We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

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I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

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It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.

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I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

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How much larger your life would be if you were smaller in it.

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Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.

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There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

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A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour's landmark.

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

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

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But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

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There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.

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It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

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

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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Art Quotes , Believe Quotes

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

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Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

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In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

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It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

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I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.

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