Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

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Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

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Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.

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The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

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When "everyone knows" that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads.

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The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.

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Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

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We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.

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To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.

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Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

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The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

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When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

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It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.

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Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

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The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.

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In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

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As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

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But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

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"Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."

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When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

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