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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
The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The pure modernist is merely a snob he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts to another.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here, repeating itself eternally.
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
A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
