Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

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The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.

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We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

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Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.

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I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

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The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.

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Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

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Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

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Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god — and always like a god.

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If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.

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America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.

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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

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Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

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The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

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He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

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The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

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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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There is only one reason an intelligent person doesn't believe in miracles. He or she believes in materialism.

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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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Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity a a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

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