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Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

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
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Historian
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Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Men
Genius
Startling
Common
Restricted
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .
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Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.
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The best kind of giving is thanksgiving.
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Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
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It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.
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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.
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The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
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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.
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An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
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Are you a devil? I am a man, answered Father Brown gravely and therefore have all devils in my heart.
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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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Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.
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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Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
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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There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.
Gilbert K. Chesterton