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Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

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.
Smell
Danger
Particular
Avoidance
Virtue
Dangers
Moral
Vivid
Pain
Separate
Thing
Vices
Like
Absence

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.
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None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
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Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.
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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
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The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.
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Is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
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There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
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A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
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To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.
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Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
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The pure modernist is merely a snob he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
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The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
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The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing the primary fact.
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When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.
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Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.
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Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
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Are you a devil? I am a man, answered Father Brown gravely and therefore have all devils in my heart.
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When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.
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All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.
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If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
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