Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

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For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

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If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.

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Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.

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There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.

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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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Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

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Progress is the mother of all problems.

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It seems to me,' said the other, 'That you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.' By George!' said Syme facing round and looking at him, 'What a clever chap you are!

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Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

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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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Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

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It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

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In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.

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Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

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Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.

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I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.

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The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

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A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

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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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