Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Sacrifice Quotes , Hatred Quotes

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Confusion Quotes , May Quotes

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes.

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And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Art Quotes , Fun Quotes

These are the things which might conceivably and truly make men forgive their enemies. We can only turn hate to love by understanding what are the things that men have loved; nor is it necessary to ask men to hate their loves in order to love one another. Just as two grocers are most likely to be reconciled when they remember for a moment that they are two fathers, so two nationals are most likely to be reconciled when they remember (if only for a moment) that they are two patriots.

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Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

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Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

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A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

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I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Stories Quotes , Firsts Quotes

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. They can't see the problem if they are looking in the wrong place. They can't see the problem if they have blinders on - for 'none are so blind as those that will not see'.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Healing Quotes , Problem Quotes

It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is to enjoy a good concert. But I do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Greed Quotes

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.

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CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.

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Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

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Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

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A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

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Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.

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

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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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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Philosophy Quotes , Fall Quotes