A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTONA child’s instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child’s hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.
More Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
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Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.
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All government is an ugly necessity.
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Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
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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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The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle
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One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.
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A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.
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A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason
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The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
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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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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
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The Mass is very long and tiresome unless one loves God.
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Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.
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Dear Sir: Regarding your article ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ I am. Yours truly.
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Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship. . .
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The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
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Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.
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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.
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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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Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
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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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Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth.
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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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When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
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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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There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON