Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Christian Quotes , Sorry Quotes

The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.

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The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.

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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

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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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Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

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It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

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A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

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A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

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Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.

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Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.

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I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

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Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.

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If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

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Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

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The philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.

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In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Philosophy Quotes , Doe Quotes

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

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We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Sacrifice Quotes , Hatred Quotes