Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Boys like romantic [fairy] tales; but babies like realistic tales - because they find them romantic...This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost prenatal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

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I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

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Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

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The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.

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Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God

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A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.

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Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

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Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

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To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.

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Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

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The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

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Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

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Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

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Romance is the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.

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Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

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A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

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Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

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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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Art is the signature of man.

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The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.

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