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A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.
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.
Taken
Wildly
Going
Nations
Extravagant
Long
Mad
Things
State
Insane
Spirit
Whenever
Political
Nation
Doe
Growing
States
Politics
Tamely
Done
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not) it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.
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
