People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTONLaughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.
More Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
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Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other’s.
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It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.
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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.
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Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.
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Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON -
But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
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The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
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All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.
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Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.
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The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.
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At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.
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Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue.
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When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.
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One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
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These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
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There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
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Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
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The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
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A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.
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Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
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Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
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Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.
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Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
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Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
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One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON