Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 29

• I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Atheist, Men, Logic

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• Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Atheist, Men, Sacred

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• Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Atheist, Manage

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• The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Suicidal, People, Effort

  The Defendant introduction (1901)

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• 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, Swings, Ideas

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• The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Religious, Evil

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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• Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Sex, Children

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• Progress is the mother of problems.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Progress, Problem

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2012). “The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton”, p.65, Ignatius Press

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• It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Asking, Advertising, Rich

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• Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Humorous, Men

  Tremendous Trifles "The Twelve Men" (1909)

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• What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Law, People, Community

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.146, Simon and Schuster

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• The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Stories, Good Story, Highest

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• If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Alive, World

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• I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Way, Facts, Fairy Tale

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Action, Social, Robbing

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• It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility . . . The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to themselves.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Sex, Erotic

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• The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Selfish, Confused, Cities

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• Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Love, Hate, Men

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• There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Age, Unions, Ghost

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• The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is like the power of mill-stones, and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Rocks, Stories, Stones

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• Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Criticism, Use

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• Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Country, Nature, Men

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• A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man - the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Views, Ignorant

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

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• Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Character, Men

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• Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  House, Bed, Void

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