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We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
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
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Type
Respectability
Animal
Tame
Talk
Tribe
Men
Tribes
Wild
Following
Animals
Broken
Rugged
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I will not hit you if you do not hit me there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each other in the holy place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not) it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
. . . For friendship implies individuality whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two but comrades are the better for being two million.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I will go forth as a real outlaw, he said, and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway and it will be counted a wilder crime.
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
of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton