Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

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Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

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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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Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.

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The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

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It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

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Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

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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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There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.

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What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

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Shouldn't atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?

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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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America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.

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Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.

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Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

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He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

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There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

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Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?

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People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

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