Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.

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Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.

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Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

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Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.

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The test of happiness is gratitude.

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We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

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Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.

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What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.

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Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

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

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The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Equality Quotes , Discovery Quotes

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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I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

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Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.

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But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

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All architecture is great architecture after sunset.

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Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

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The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

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I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.

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We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man.

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