Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

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A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man - the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

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Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

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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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Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

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The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism - the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.

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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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We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Civilization Quotes

In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Matter Quotes , Sides Quotes

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Heaven Quotes , Atheism Quotes

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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The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

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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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If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

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A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.

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Every true artist feels that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.

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Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

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I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

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The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

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