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Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

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
Historian
Illustrator
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Faith
Hope
Hoping
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Hopeless
Mean
Believing
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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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
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We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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
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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
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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
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The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship. . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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
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It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton