Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

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The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

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I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

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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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A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.

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We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

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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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Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

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It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.

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Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.

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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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I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

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In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

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When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.

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Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

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As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

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When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

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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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It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

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