Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

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No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.

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The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

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It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

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Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

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In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.

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There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Life Quotes , Happiness Quotes

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

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Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

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The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

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Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

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Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.

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It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.

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The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. ... It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wilderness lies in wait.

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It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.

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Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.

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The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

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The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.

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In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

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Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.

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