Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains.

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...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

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The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

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To be simple is the best thing in the world.

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Keys Quotes , Bangs Quotes

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.

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Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

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If man is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust.

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A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

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Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

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Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

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Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

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Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.

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That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

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I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

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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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Only poor men get hanged.

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Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

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The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something - war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.

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An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

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