Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

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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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The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

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The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

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There nearly always is a method in madness.

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...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

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A third-class carriage is a community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits.

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Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant

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There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end.

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It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

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I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.

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By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

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...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

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To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.

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It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

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We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.

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

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A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet.

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Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

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