Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

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It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

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What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

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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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A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

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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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The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house - this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.

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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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The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.

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If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

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To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.

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An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

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The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

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When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.

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Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.

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Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

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Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

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Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

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There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

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