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Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.

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.
Men
Normal
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People
Dreams
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Thousand
Chooses
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Looking
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Ten
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Never
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All architecture is great architecture after sunset.
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There is also an insulting speech about 'one grey day just like another'. You might as well talk about one green tree like another.
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One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.
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Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
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Science boasts of the distance of its stars of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is At Hand.
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Thanks are the highest form of thought.
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Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.
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The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
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Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.
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The true object of human life is play.
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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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In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.
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Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
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Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
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I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
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How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
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Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.
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The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.
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Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
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The supreme adventure is being BORN
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