Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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.
Cannot
Follows
Past
Blank
Many
Images
Important
Principle
Much
Depends
Principles
Call
Fling
Future
Largely
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Man does not live by soap alone and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a case for telling the truth there is a case for avoiding the scandal but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth
Gilbert K. Chesterton
...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
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Theology is only thought applied to religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men he is a man so strong that he feels more.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
