Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.

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

We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.

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The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

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Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.

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The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

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Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

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The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

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The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Christian Quotes , Religious Quotes

Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

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Research is the search of people who don't know what they want.

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You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.

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The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation, and admired for the wrong reasons.

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A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it.

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The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

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The center of every man's existence is a dream.

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Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.

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You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , May Quotes

Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

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Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

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It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. "I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.

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