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Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart - the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

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.
Dark
Admit
Phantom
Heaven
Guides
Invoke
Strong
Errors
Phantoms
Earth
Conscience
Apology
Human
Destiny
Phrase
Humans
Weak
Virtuous
Heart
Watches
Phrases
Every
Silence
Error
Dethrone

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.
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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
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It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Every man is important if he loses his lifeand every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Comradeship is obvious and universal and open but it is only one kind of affection it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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I believe in preaching to the converted for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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
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A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth this has been reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton