QUOTES by Gilbert K Chesterton
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“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“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.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“There’d be a lot less scandal if people didn’t idealize sin and pose as sinners.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.” –
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“It’s not that we don’t have enough scoundrels to curse; it’s that we don’t have enough good men to curse them.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
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.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Quote by -Gilbert K Chesterton