Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

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We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

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...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

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Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.

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Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.

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A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

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Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

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An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

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The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

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It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them

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I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.

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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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It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

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The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

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The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

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Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

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Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.

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The Mass is not only about God becoming man, it is about Man becoming more himself.

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Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

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It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.

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