Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Military Quotes , Army Quotes

The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

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

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

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Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

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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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A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

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It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.

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Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

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I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

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I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.

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Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

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There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.

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Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.

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In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

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

There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical...It is things going right," he cried, "that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry...the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Sea Quotes , Sick Quotes

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

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A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.

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The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

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The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.

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

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

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