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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

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
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Crime Writer
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.
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The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.
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Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
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There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
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Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant
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If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
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We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
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Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.
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You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
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Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.
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We are passing into a social phase in which unless a heroic effort is made for human dignity and freedom, gold will be the sole method of government and therefore the sole standard of manners.
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It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.
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The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.
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None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
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It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.
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All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
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Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.
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Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
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Tea, although an OrientalIs a gentleman at leastCocoa is a cad and coward,Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
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Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton