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In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.
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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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
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Devil's walking parody On all four-footed things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I despise Birth-Control first because it is ... an entirely meaningless word and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
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
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals nay it is treachery to comrades.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The pure modernist is merely a snob he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton