Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head.

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

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

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The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.

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Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.

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The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

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A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.

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(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

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It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything - even pride.

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Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

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The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

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In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.

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There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

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We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.

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I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

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humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle

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I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.

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Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.

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

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

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[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.

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I am at one with my duality.

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