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The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.

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

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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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What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I will not hit you if you do not hit me there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each other in the holy place.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.
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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Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship. . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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To be simple is the best thing in the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Puritanism was an honourable mood it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
Gilbert K. Chesterton