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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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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I believe in preaching to the converted for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour's landmark.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
