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The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
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.
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is also an insulting speech about 'one grey day just like another'. You might as well talk about one green tree like another.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex they can breed thoughts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
