Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

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Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

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The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.

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If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

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The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

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The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

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An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

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Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

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We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

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The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.

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The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

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Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales-because they find them romantic.

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If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

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If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.

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Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

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If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.

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The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

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The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.

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