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All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.
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
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All government is an ugly necessity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
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
It is true that I am of an older fashion much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.
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
You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages-Might as well talk about prudent suicides.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
