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Gilbert Keith Chesterton

conservative English writer of the Roman Catholic persuasion; in addition to volumes of criticism and polemics he wrote detective novels featuring Father Brown (1874-1936)

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All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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We make our friends we make our enemies but God makes our next door neighbour.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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A good novel tells you the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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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 Keith Chesterton

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Beans beans the magical fruit the more you eat the more you toot the more you eat the better you feel so let's eat beans for every meal.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Coincidences are spiritual puns.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Dogmatism does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul, but his life.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh Because it is a gravely religious matter it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd for only man can be dignified.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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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 Keith Chesterton

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Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return....Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realise in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows and that all things are but aspects of one thing a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God 'No,' said Father Brown.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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There is something to be said for every error but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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