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When everyone knows that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads.
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.
Opposite
Leads
Opposites
Interesting
Everyone
Often
Something
Always
Illuminating
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.
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
It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
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
Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.
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
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
