Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

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If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

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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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The average businessman began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out.

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The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

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THERE are no wise few; for in all men rages the folly of the Fall. Take your strongest, happiest, handsomest, best born, best bred, best instructed men on earth and give them special power for half an hour and because they are men they will begin to [perform] badly.

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Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

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He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

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A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

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If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

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The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

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Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

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Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

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I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

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Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

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Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

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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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Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

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With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.

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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

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