Tao Te Ching
G. K. Chesterton
1874 – 1936 CE
Social critic, theologian, and philosopher turning popular proverbs inside out with deep insight and laugh-out-loud humor; Chesterton was called both the best writer and best thinker of the 20th century, “the most unjustly neglected writer of our time,” and the "prince of paradox.” One of the most prolific authors of all time, he wrote more than 100 books, hundreds of poems, plays, short stories and over 4000 newspaper articles. Over 300 pounds and 6’4,” normally wandering around lost with a cigar in his mouth, writing many of his articles in train stations after inadvertently missing his train; he criticized both capitalism and socialism predicting the modern polemic stalemate of progressives “continually making mistakes” while conservatives continue to “prevent the mistakes from being corrected." He influenced atheist C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, the movement for Irish Independence, and Gandhi’s movement to end British colonial rule. He “changed the life” of Marshall McLuhan and inspired the novels and writings of Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, E.F. Schumacher, Bertrand Russell and many more.
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Gilded Age (1860 – 1900 CE)
Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Victorian (1837 – 1901 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Unlisted Sources
All Things Considered (1908)
Chaucer (1959)
Dramatic Unities
The Everlasting Man (1925)
The Uses of Diversity
Quotes by G. K. Chesterton (39 quotes)
“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
Chapters:
1. The Unnamed
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“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident… they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
Chapters:
46. Enough
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“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”
Chapters:
67. Three Treasures
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“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
Chapters:
47. Effortless Success
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“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
Chapters:
65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness
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“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”
Chapters:
43. No Effort, No Trace
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“Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.”
Chapters:
15. Inscrutability
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“It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
Chapters:
56. One with the Dust
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“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
Chapters:
75. Greed
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“It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”
Chapters:
36. The Small, Dark Light
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“Journalism largely consists in saying, "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
Chapters:
35. The Power of Goodness
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“One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
Chapters:
61. Lying Low
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“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
Chapters:
63. Easy as Hard
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“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
Chapters:
41. Distilled Life
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“The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.”
Chapters:
80. A Golden Age
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“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
Chapters:
23. Nothing and Not
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“The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
Chapters:
51. Mysterious Goodness
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“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”
Chapters:
47. Effortless Success
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“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”
Chapters:
78. Water
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“We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.”
Chapters:
30. No War
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“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
Chapters:
62. Basic Goodness
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“Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”
Chapters:
38. Fruit Over Flowers
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“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
Chapters:
67. Three Treasures
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“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
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“Patience is a most necessary quality for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request.”
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“Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message.”
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“The Rubáiyát is the bible of the ‘carpe diem religion’”
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“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”
from Dramatic Unities
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“Chaucer was one of the most original men who ever lived. There had never been anything like the lively realism of the ride to Canterbury done or dreamed of in our literature before. He is not only the father of all our poets, but the grandfather of all our hundred million novelists.”
from Chaucer (1959)
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“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 around.”
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“All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.”
from The Uses of Diversity
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“the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English history.”
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“One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
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“A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world... that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact.”
from The Everlasting Man (1925)
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“To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not that sure about being quiet.”
from All Things Considered (1908)
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“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.”
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Quotes about G. K. Chesterton (1 quotes)
“G. K. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who devoted himself to Roman Catholic propaganda.”
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