Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

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I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.

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It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.

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But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

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A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

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I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

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Spring never is spring unless it comes too soon.

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Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

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A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

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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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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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And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

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The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.

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What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

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This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

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I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

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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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I despise Birth-Control first because it is ... an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth.

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Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.

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Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales-because they find them romantic.

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