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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 89759e2 | Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion. | religion worldview | G.K. Chesterton | |
| be17a40 | Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories...cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful. | writing | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 53a8349 | There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men... these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. T.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 88839a2 | even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| ce1736d | He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 24701ca | The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 348557a | Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. | isolation | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 9a77746 | I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left. | politics socialism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| a7e2c28 | I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking on his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| a3df349 | The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| aa379a3 | The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! | coercion force risk | G.K. Chesterton | |
| b9d97d4 | Confetti, bonbons, artillery. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| ab82053 | I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. | belief | G.K. Chesterton | |
| a7247cb | Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we kno.. | existence life | G.K. Chesterton | |
| cf6880f | International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other. | g-k-chesterton | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 860defa | And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 0a4de13 | Who are you?' he asked suddenly. I'm not sure,' replied the other. 'I rather think I am your long-lost brother.' | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 7b80dca | The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| fef2317 | But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b214f64 | The more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing, the less he knows it. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| bbe8167 | I earnestly hope that all children will spoil this book by painting the illustrations. I wanted to do this myself but the publishers would not let me. But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2ce4f57 | A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 515633c | To him, even the momentary was momentous. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 03a556f | G. K. Chesterton wrote: "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."2 Change means you're alive, my friend." -- | Jen Hatmaker | ||
| 3948df4 | Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| a5f975e | And he set to rhyme his ale-measures, And he sang aloud his laws, Because of the joy of giants, The joy without a cause. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 788fb7a | And well may God with the serving-folk Cast in His dreadful lot; Is not He too a servant, And is not He forgot? For was not God my gardener And silent like a slave; That opened oaks on the uplands Or thicket in graveyard gave? And was not God my armourer, All patient and unpaid, That sealed my skull as a helmet, And ribs for hauberk made? Did not a great grey servant Of all my sires and me, Build this pavilion of the pines, And herd the fow.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2e325d6 | If the great paradox of Christianity means anything it means this- that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it. Carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 7adbe10 | No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating and drinking. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| f11f506 | A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers. | coal the-coloured-lands | G.K. Chesterton | |
| bdc86bc | Fairy Tales give you more than just smile. | fairy-tales-retold fairytales hope love love-quotes paraphrasing-g-k-chesterton relationship-quotes smile true-love | Ameya Agrawal | |
| 0b46296 | The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume.. | doctrine dogma progress rationalism truth | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 3633001 | The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. ...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people on the prosaic may perpetually miss. ...wisdom should not reckon on the unforeseen. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 62b2caa | The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 9f7ccd1 | Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the ho.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 9e5bac6 | We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 39d03b8 | The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 102c6ff | The romantic seeks only to get his head into the heavens. The rationalist seeks to get the heavens into his head - and it is his head that splits. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| dcf7e2e | He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 54e1b87 | Self is the gorgon. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b8ac460 | The adoration of Christ had been a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, in that sense may be said to begin here. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 6842c7b | The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day, There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away, And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide, Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride. The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars, With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars, Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above, The roaring .. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 87914a8 | But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he wa.. | catholicism chesterton christian christianity desire humility love lovers unworthy | G.K. Chesterton | |
| e74cb1e | When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their ho.. | experience idealism politics practicality youth | G.K. Chesterton |