Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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

St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Book Quotes , Pages Quotes

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. ... It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wilderness lies in wait.

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We are all ordinary people. And it's the extraordinary people Who know it.

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She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

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

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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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Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.

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Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Love Quotes , God Quotes

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

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

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

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America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.

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Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

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We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.

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Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

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Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Believe Quotes , Opportunity Quotes

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Country Quotes , Book Quotes

It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

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It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

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Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

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