With monstrous head and sickening cry / And ears like errant wings, / The devil's walking parody / On all four-footed things.
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A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
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Among the very rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
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The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
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The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
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Hardy went down to botanize in the swamp, while Meredith climbed towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily dressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.
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A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
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Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals nay it is treachery to comrades.
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All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
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The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.
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People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.
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Merrily taking twopenny ale and cheese with a pocket knife; / But these were luxuries not for him who went for the Simple Life.
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Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
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It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh Because it is a gravely religious matter it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd for only man can be dignified.
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The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return....Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realise in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows and that all things are but aspects of one thing a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God 'No,' said Father Brown.
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The man who sees consistency in things is a wit; the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist.
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Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.
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Silence is the unbearable repartee.
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Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.
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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.
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We make our friends we make our enemies but God makes our next door neighbour.
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Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
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The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
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Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
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Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
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Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
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A good novel tells you the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author.
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It is at unimportant moments that a man is a gentleman. At important moments he ought to be something better.
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The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.
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How beautiful it would be for someone who could not read.
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