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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

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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Beaconsfield
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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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Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.
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Science boasts of the distance of its stars of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is At Hand.
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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.
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There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.
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I believe in preaching to the converted for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.
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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
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Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
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The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
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When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
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There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
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Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.
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[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
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Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.
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...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.
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People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
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My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.
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There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
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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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Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.
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