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Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings but they dream of being shepherds.

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.
Dream
Trying
Yearn
Men
Shepherds
Rush
Complexity
Simplicity
Towards
Kings

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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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You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
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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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In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.
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if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
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The eagle has no liberty he only has loneliness.
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A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth this has been exactly reversed.
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We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.
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Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.
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Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.
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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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Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.
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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.
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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
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The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.
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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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There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.
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Here ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?
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One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego the self is more distant than any star.
Gilbert K. Chesterton