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The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
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Crime Writer
Essayist
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Literature
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Humility is the mother of giants.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree the poetry of love in following the single woman the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is always the secure who are humble.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher it is casting out a devil.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
