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G. K. Chesterton

35 free books by G. K. Chesterton. 35 you can read right here.

Born 1874 in Kensington · Died 1936 in Beaconsfield

writer, novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, journalist · United Kingdom

Notable works: The Club of Queer Trades, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

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Facts from Wikidata (Q183167), retrieved 2026-09-26.

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Quotes from G. K. Chesterton’s books

Verified word for word in the text: each quote is copied exactly from the book’s text in this site’s reader (the Project Gutenberg e-text named under each book) and links to its passage; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against that text. How RedLectern is built.

Orthodoxy

From Project Gutenberg e-text #130 (public domain in the USA).

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

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The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

From Project Gutenberg e-text #1695 (public domain in the USA).

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.

— Syme · XIV. THE SIX PHILOSOPHERS

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Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself?

— Spoken by a character · XV. THE ACCUSER

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Manalive

From Project Gutenberg e-text #1718 (public domain in the USA).

‘I don’t deny,’ he said, ‘that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

— Spoken by a character · II. The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge

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