Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

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It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

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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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Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

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You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.

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The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.

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These are the things which might conceivably and truly make men forgive their enemies. We can only turn hate to love by understanding what are the things that men have loved; nor is it necessary to ask men to hate their loves in order to love one another. Just as two grocers are most likely to be reconciled when they remember for a moment that they are two fathers, so two nationals are most likely to be reconciled when they remember (if only for a moment) that they are two patriots.

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If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

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One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

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The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

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For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

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The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

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Atheism is too theological.

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The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.

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If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

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The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

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The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.

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...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Children Quotes , Humorous Quotes

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.

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