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Quotations from
G.K. Chesterton [1874-1936]

      British author Gilbert Keith 'G.K.' Chesterton is most famous in the popular realm for the 53 'Father Brown' detective stories published between 1911 and 1936; in the academic realm, he is famous as a political thinker, lay theologian, and wide-ranging critic.

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G.K. Chesterton entry at Wikipedia
55 Chesterton etexts are available online at Project Gutenberg
The American Chesterton Society [est. 1996] is based in Minnesota

G.K. Chesterton Page at BlackHat Mystery Bookstore

G.K. Chesterton Collection in Kindle format  "The Works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton" for Kindle [2012]
Kindle Edition from Delphi Classics [5/2012] for $1.99
All of Chesterton's public domain works, and more, including: "The Innocence of Father Brown" [stories 1911], "Wisdom of Father Brown" [stories 1914], and "Uncollected Stories of Father Brown" with index of all three and the original illustrations; five novels, with illustrations; three short story collections, with index; three poetry collections, with index; stageplays "Magic' [1913] and "The Turkey and The Turk" [1925]; 25 non-fiction books, each with index; uncollected essays, with rare articles by Chesterton; four critical books and other essays; and an image gallery including still photos from motion pictures



“It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.”
in "The Ballad of The White Horse" (1911)  {blog 3/2010}
•      •
“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a
tired man who wants a book to read.”  {blog 6/2011}
•      •
“If someone thinks that he does not live by a philosophy, then what he really lives by are the scraps
and tail-ends of other people's broken and discarded philosophies.”  {blog 10/2011}
•      •
“We must learn to love life without ever trusting it.”  {blog 3/2012}
•      •
“Silence is the unbearable repartee.”  {blog 4/2012}
•      •
“Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.”  {blog 8/2012}
•      •
“There are no rationalists. We all believe in fairy tales, and live in them.”  {blog 9/2012}
•      •
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”  {blog 10/2012}
•      •
“The only way of catching a train [that] I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”  {blog 11/2012}
•      •
“The problem with capitalism is not too many capitalists, but not enough capitalists.”  {blog 11/2012}
•      •
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.”  {blog 1/2013}
•      •
“Theology is simply the part of religion that requires brains.”  {blog 7/2013}
•      •
“When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing: they believe in anything.” (often attributed to Chesterton)  {blog 8/2013}
•      •
“Tolerance is the virtue of a man without conviction.”  {blog 8/2013}
•      •
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”  {blog 6/2015}
•      •
I am silent in the club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife
Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.
No more the milk of cows
Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian.
I will stick to port and sherry,
For they are so very, very
So very, very, very Vegetarian.
{blog 1/2018}
•      •
“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.”  {blog 2/2018}
•      •
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”  {blog 5/2018}
•      •
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”  {blog 6/2018}
•      •
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”  {blog 6/2018}
•      •
“A great nation ought not to be a hammer, but a magnet.”  {blog 12/2018}
•      •
“Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”  {blog 12/2019}

G.K. Chesterton Quotations Not Yet Used on Blog

"He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head."

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