Quote

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.

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.
Giving
Saint
Morality
Luxuries
Make
Clean
Deliberately
People
Rich
Soap
Poor
Saints
Give
Reverence
Enough
Luxury
Must
Dirty

More quotes by 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
Romance is the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing the primary fact.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
It is the decisive people who have become civilised it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.
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
Image
In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals nay it is treachery to comrades.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
It is true that I am of an older fashion much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.
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
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
Gilbert K. Chesterton