G. K. Chesterton Quotes
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Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.
[Politics]
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True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.
[Active]
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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.
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We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
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We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
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We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.
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We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
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What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.
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What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
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What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
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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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When people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.
[Religion]
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When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
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When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
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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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With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
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Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
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Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
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You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution
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You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
[Forgiveness]
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