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People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

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.
Never
Speaking
Perilous
People
Heavy
Orthodoxy
Exciting
Sanity
Habit
Sane
Safe
Dramatic
Religion
Mad
Anything
Fallen
Something
Foolish
Humdrum

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.
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He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
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A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is.
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If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Progress is the mother of problems.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The aim of life is appreciation there is no sense in not appreciating things and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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God is not a symbol of goodness goodness is a symbol of God
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
Gilbert K. Chesterton