Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.

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I am myself so exceedingly Nordic, as far as physical constitution is concerned, that I can enjoy almost any weather except what is called glorious weather. At the end of a few days, I am left wondering how the men of the Mediterranean ever managed to do almost all the most active and astonishing things that have been done.

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It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.

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"Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."

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The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.

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The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

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Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

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Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.

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When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

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It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

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All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

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We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed

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

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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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Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

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The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

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A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

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You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

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A yawn is a silent shout.

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The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

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