Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Long Quotes , Metaphysical Quotes

I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Men Quotes , One Day Quotes

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

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Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Writing Quotes , Years Quotes

Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

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The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.

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What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Wisdom Quotes , Hands Quotes

When you with velvets mantled o'er, Defy December's tempests frore, Oh! spare one garment from your store, To clothe the poor at Christmas.

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One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

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The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

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

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We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

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When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

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Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

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

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Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

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The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

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Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

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A crown of roses is also a crown of thorns.

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But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

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