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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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
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Crime Writer
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Historian
Illustrator
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Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Interesting
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.
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A crown of roses is also a crown of thorns.
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A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
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It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot the average man is a serf.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings but they dream of being shepherds.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Do not, I beseech you be troubled by the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistake the hour of the night: it is already morning.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton