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A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.
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
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong... A stiff apology is a second insult.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
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
To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to descibe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Faith is always at a disadvantage it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
