Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

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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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Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

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One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.

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Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.

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The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

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Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

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We actually love ourselves more than we love joy.

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Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

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In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

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Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

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No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.

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It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.

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What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

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Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

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Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

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Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

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I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.

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Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Philosophical Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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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