Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

[V]ariety of climate should always go with stability of abode.... an Englishman’s house is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud.

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Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

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For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.

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The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

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A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.

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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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The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

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People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

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There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Ignorance Quotes , Poetic Quotes

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.

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The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

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To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

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It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

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I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee.

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It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

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No sane person, I hope, would accuse me of saying that every Distributist must drink beer; especially if he could brew his own cider or found claret better for his health. But I do most emphatically scorn and scout the vulgar refinement that regards beer as something unseemly and humiliating. And I would shout the name of beer a hundred times a day, to shock all the snobs who have so shameful a sense of shame.

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Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.

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To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.

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The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

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And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

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