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"Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back."
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"The concepts of Joss are pure, and express attitudes and technical ideals."

"It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren."

"When you get a principle on which everyone is agreed, you get the beginning of complacency and deterioration."

"Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!"
Explore more quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."

"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."

"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet."

"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."

"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."

"A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality."

"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life."

"The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers."
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