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There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

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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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
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Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.
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Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
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The wine they drink in Paradise They make in Haute Lorraine.
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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
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He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
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When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
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It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.
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Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.
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Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant
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The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
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Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
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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.
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We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.
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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.
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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
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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.
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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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To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
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Art is the signature of man.
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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.
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