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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.

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

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.
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A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.
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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
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There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.
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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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No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.
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The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
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Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
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The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.
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The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.
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It is true that I am of an older fashion much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
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All men are ordinary men the extraordinary men are those who know it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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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He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.
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Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
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Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
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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
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...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.
Gilbert K. Chesterton