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Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

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

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The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.
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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.
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Women are the only realists their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.
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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
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To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
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We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
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It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here, repeating itself eternally.
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Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.
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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.
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The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
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My brain and this world don't fit each other and there's an end of it.
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There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
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A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
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...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
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The true object of human life is play.
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Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.
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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.
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If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.
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Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton