Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

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I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Motivational Quotes

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.

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The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

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Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Lying Quotes , Simple 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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Religious Quotes , Cosmos Quotes

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Fall Quotes , Tired Quotes

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

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When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

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The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Home Quotes

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

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A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

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Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.

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Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

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Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.

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As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

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London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

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Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

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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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The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.

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