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The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
G. K. Chesterton
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There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.
G. K. Chesterton
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
G. K. Chesterton
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There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.... A stiff apology is a second insult.
G. K. Chesterton
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Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.
G. K. Chesterton
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The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.
G. K. Chesterton
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The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.
G. K. Chesterton
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The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.
G. K. Chesterton
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I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.
G. K. Chesterton
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A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.
G. K. Chesterton
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Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.
G. K. Chesterton
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Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
G. K. Chesterton
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And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.
G. K. Chesterton
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The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.
G. K. Chesterton
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Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
G. K. Chesterton
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The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
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But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.
G. K. Chesterton
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Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
G. K. Chesterton
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Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes—that they have done for some time past—they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. … I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.
G. K. Chesterton
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A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying: Of course I do not like green cheese; I am very fond of brown sherry.
G. K. Chesterton
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The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God.
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Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
G. K. Chesterton
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The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.
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What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place...The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which made him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
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We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.
G. K. Chesterton
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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
G. K. Chesterton
Creative Commons
Born:
May 29, 1874
Died:
June 14, 1936
(aged 62)
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