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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

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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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Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
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Surprise is the secret of joy.
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The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.
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And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
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And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
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I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
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The only object of liberty is life.
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Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
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In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.
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Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are - of immeasurable stature.
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Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.
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It is human to err and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.
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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.
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America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
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It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand as long as he understands that he does not understand it.
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The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
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The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.
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You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.
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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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