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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
Women are the only realists their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is the decisive people who have become civilised it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Man is always something worse or something better than an animal and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump you may be freeing him from being a camel.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Theology is only thought applied to religion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .
Gilbert K. Chesterton
When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
