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

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

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Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means.
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One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego the self is more distant than any star.
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Art is the signature of man.
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There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong... A stiff apology is a second insult.
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But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.
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When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.
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We are always giving foreign names to very native things. If there is a thing that reeks of the glorious tradition of the old English tavern, it is toasted cheese. But for some wild reason we call it Welsh rarebit. I believe that what we call Irish stew might more properly be called English stew, and that it is not particularly familiar in Ireland.
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Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
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It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.
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Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.
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The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.
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Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
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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.
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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.
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The supreme adventure is being BORN
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Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I will not hit you if you do not hit me there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each other in the holy place.
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When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
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A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
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We actually love ourselves more than we love joy.
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If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.
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