Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

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A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

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The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

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A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.

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A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.

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The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

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The only defensible war is a war of defense.

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To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

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Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.

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The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

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[Paradox is] truth standing on its head to gain attention.

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Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.

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Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.

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Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

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Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways. ... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.

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While once it was the rank and file that cheered with all the partisan passions at their heights, today it is the party leaders who are cheering themselves; and all by themselves. The mob that is their audience is in one vast universal trance, thinking about something else.

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I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

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That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

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Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

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Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

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