Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.

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Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.

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The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.

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A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy.

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Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

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People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

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Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.

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He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

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There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Confusion Quotes , May Quotes

A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

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I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.

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The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

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The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

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Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.

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There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

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A naked moon stood in a naked sky.

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Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

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A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

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