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An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.
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
There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.
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Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The atheist is not interested in anything except attacks on atheism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.
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It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex they can breed thoughts.
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Surprise is the secret of joy.
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Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
