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c4a3792
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One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a6f021e
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A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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1b32c46
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And that is just the note; that's the unmistakable style. People who complain are just jolly, human Christian nuisances; I don't mind them. But people who complain that they never complain are the devil. They are really the devil; isn't that swagger of stoicism the whole point of the Byronic cult of Satan? I heard all this; but for the life of me I couldn't hear of anything tangible she had to complain of.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a9a8954
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I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2382253
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Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0e48f50
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Really," said Gregory superciliously, "the examples you choose-" "I beg your pardon," said Syme grimly, "I thought we had abolished all conventions."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0ad5d64
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Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion involves that you will reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation, if you will consent to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return--" "You will promise me in re..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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40f9288
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But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing a man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b3757e8
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The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b3aee7b
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It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does no..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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006e5cf
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There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market-gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a4edb01
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metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2689ed7
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Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b9d5f44
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The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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eedaa47
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You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.
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silence
friends
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ce56e9f
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Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ed64e27
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Of the last two friends of yours who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other thought it right to eat men...
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b018e9c
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The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This ..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7194bc5
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Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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fcf7d2c
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A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d5d8730
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They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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efcbc47
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Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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bcde4e6
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Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. "Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for...
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b706307
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But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is this: That we should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is p..
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reading
learning
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G.K. Chesterton |
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02cd4ca
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To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
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education
morals
standards
values
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3f392ba
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As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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85541ce
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When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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41fc8b9
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There are some people, nevertheless -- and I am one of them -- who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. ... We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5f1eab8
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We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f02bc6f
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In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation -- it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8c1ad21
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Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are -- of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlast..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5664358
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There are some refusals which, though they may be done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young mothers when their husbands were in the field against us. Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8692289
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But in practice the great difference between the medieval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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bb67377
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Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild, amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high tops..
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fantastic-beasts
nightmare
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5401010
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It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.
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science
philosophy-of-life
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d0d8665
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All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3379f7f
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A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.
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thinking
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cf74ab1
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It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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242089c
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Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all. It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the difference between the fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind. Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens. H..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d2511bd
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As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.
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progress
heaven
idealism
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8597eec
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The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
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humor
fairies
materialism
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3294a51
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The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, l..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7a74b45
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Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought
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G.K. Chesterton |
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14e093f
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Inside I am really bursting with boyish merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I can't leave off.
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reserve
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G.K. Chesterton |