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Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
Biographer
Crime Writer
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Historian
Novelist
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Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
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Walking
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Votes
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.
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Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.
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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
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Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
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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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The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
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The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
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The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.
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There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
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We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad, replied Syme with perfect calm but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The strangest whim has seized me ... After all I think I will not hang myself today.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
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It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
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Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
Gilbert K. Chesterton