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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

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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.
Two
False
Even
Kinds
Much
Merely
Paradoxes
Kind
Produce
Announce
Good
Modern
Fruitful
Life
Rather
Barren
Death
Paradox
True
Nearly

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
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The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
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Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.
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The world will never starve for want of wonders but only for want of wonder.
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It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
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White... is not a mere absence of colour it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
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There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
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Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.
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By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
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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.
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The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.
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A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.
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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.
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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.
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In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?
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Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
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The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.
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Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.
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If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.
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To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.
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