Essential Chesterton - Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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Essential Chesterton

“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.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.” Click To Tweet

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

“Art is the signature of man.”

“The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is this: that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.”

“There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.”

“The free man is not he who thinks all opinions equally true or false; that is not freedom but feeble-mindedness. The free man is he who sees the errors as clearly as he sees the truth.”

“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”

“The most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.”

“Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“People forget how to be grateful unless they learn how to be humble.”

“One of the most necessary and most neglected points, about the story called history, is the fact that the story is not finished.”

“There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.”

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

“Take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural.”

“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. ”

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“Daybreak is a never-ending glory; getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance.”

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

“Education is only truth in a state of transmission.”

“Though we are all liars, we all love the truth.”

“Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”

“The unpardonable sin is being bored.”