Quote

Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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.
Word
Fastidious
Words
Implies
Living
Nowadays
Use
Formal
Truth
Correct
Wanted
Memory
Much
Meaning
Life
Memories

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image
Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
And it is always the humble man who talks too much the proud man watches himself too closely.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing the primary fact.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun it is imagination.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
How quickly revolutions grow old and, worse still, respectable.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles it was a miraculous world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
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
Image
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Image
It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton