A dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing can go against it.
"Gilbert Keith Chesterton", Order of St. Gregory the Great/KC*SG better known as "G. K. Chesterton", was an English writer, lay theologian, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, literary and art critic, biographer, and Christian apologist. Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of paradox." Time (magazine)/Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."
More G. K. Chesterton on Wikipedia.I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
For in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
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.
He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.
If a rhinoceros were to enter this resteraunt now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I would be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.
The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.
Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
His horror is wild, but it is a sane horror.
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and not tried.
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.
Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all nations have been ashamed of them.
The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals...
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
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