Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. ... It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wilderness lies in wait.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Real Quotes , Lying Quotes

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

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In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it or he would be obviously below it.

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What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

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People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

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Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

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The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

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Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

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All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

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'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

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You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

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If the world grows to worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows to worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldlyness by the world.

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...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

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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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Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

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None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

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Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

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Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

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Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

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The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.

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