Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

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Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

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For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

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The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

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children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.

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There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

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I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution.

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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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Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

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Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

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When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

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Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.

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A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

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People that insist upon drinking and driving, are putting the quart before the hearse.

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

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We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.

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Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

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Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

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If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

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And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

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