Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

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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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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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Silence is the unbearable repartee.

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The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

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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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Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

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The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone's account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.

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The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

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I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.

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All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

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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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Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

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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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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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There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong... A stiff apology is a second insult.

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An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

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The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

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The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Intelligent Quotes , Trying Quotes