Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

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And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.

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What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

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Nobody notices postmen, yet they have passions like other men.

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What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

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Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.

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The human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts to another.

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The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

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Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.

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Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

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The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

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The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

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Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.

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Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

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There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

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Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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

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Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

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Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

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