Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

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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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All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

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Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

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The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.

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The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.

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The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

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Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

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If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?

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I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.

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In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

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All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

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My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.

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Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

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All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

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Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.

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Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.

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If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

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But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

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