Quotes by G. K. Chesterton
The following are quotes from G. K. Chesterton:
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
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.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
I believe in getting into hot water it keeps you clean.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
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.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
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.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
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.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
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.
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