Clearness Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

“When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.”

Gilbert K. Chesterton

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.7 out of 5 (8 ratings)

More by Gilbert K. Chesterton

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place...The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which made him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his…

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Image

Explore all 868 Gilbert K. Chesterton quotes

More Clearness quotes

He was not only, I soon discovered, a water drinker, but a strict vegetarian, to which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the…

Charles Kingsley

Image

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast…

Charles Dickens

Image

...one can speak with the utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by anyone.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Image

Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in…

John Stuart Mill

Image

The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.

Hippocrates

Image

What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophesy or as poesy...should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open up new, deeper and purer sources of joyous…

Margaret Fuller

I believe there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has. How often one goes to sleep troubled and full of pain, not knowing what causes the travail, and in the morning a whole new direction and a clearness…

John Steinbeck

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Hippocrates

Image

The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that…

John Ruskin

Image

It is not enough that a man has clearness of vision, and reliance on sincerity, he must also have the art of expression, or…

George Henry Lewes

Image

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become…

Jim Harrison

Image

Eutrapelia . "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice…

Matthew Arnold

Image

Browse all 64 Clearness quotes

Clearness Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Related quotes

More by Gilbert K. Chesterton

More Clearness quotes