Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

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Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Criticism Quotes

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

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Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

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Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

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Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

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Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

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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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The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

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The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

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Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

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The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

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What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

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America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.

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Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

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It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... "It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here", repeating itself eternally.

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Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

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Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

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Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.

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Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Voice Quotes , Christ Quotes