The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
G.K. Chesterton
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
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The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
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Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
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He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
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Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
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The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
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For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
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I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
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The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be true, it is therefore impossible that one of them should really be true. The argument would appear on the face of it to be illogical, if anyone nowadays troubled about logic. It would be as reasonable to say that because some people thought the earth was flat, and others (rather less incorrectly) imagined it was round, and because anybody is free to say that it is triangular or hexagonal, or a rhomboid, therefore it has no shape at all; or its shape can never be discovered; and, anyhow, modern science must be wrong in saying it is an oblate spheroid. The world must be some shape, and it must be that shape and no other; and it is not self-evident that nobody can possibly hit on the right one. What so obviously applies to the material shape of the world equally applies to the moral shape of the universe. The man who describes it may not be right, but it is no argument against his rightness that a number of other people must be wrong.
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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.
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But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
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I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
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I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
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[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
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