Quote

Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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.
People
Legs
Presents
Grateful
Santa
Gift
Miraculous
Cigars
Birth
Toys
Sweets
Sweet
Gifts
Stockings
Present
Puts
Claus
Two
Birthday
Slippers
Children
Thank
Cigar

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Half a truth is better than no politics.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton