G. K. Chesterton quotes (29):

  • Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
  • Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
  • An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
  • Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
  • Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.
  • I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
  • Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
  • By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
  • A room without books is like a body without a soul.
  • A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
  • My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, My mother, drunk or sober.
  • I believe in getting into hot water it keeps you clean.
  • Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
  • Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
  • I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
  • There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
  • Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
  • The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
  • To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
  • Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
  • Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
  • The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.
  • It is not bigotry to be certain we are right but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
  • If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
  • The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
  • All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
  • There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
  • There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
  • It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.