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Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.
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.
Reality
Thing
Unreality
Men
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Reform
Evolution
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I will go forth as a real outlaw, he said, and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway and it will be counted a wilder crime.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All things are from God and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You don't want to be so open minded that your brains fall out!
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity for the world denied Christ's.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
