Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

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When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.

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The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

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Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

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Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

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There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

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The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

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The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

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We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

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Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

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The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.

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Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

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Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

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Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

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Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.

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It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

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A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

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Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

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Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

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Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

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