Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by G. K. Chesterton

You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
– G. K. Chesterton
No animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.
– G. K. Chesterton
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
– G. K. Chesterton
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
– G. K. Chesterton
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
– G. K. Chesterton
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.
– G. K. Chesterton
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.
– G. K. Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
– G. K. Chesterton
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
– G. K. Chesterton
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
– G. K. Chesterton
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.
– G. K. Chesterton
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
– G. K. Chesterton
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
– G. K. Chesterton
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
– G. K. Chesterton
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
– G. K. Chesterton
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
– G. K. Chesterton
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
– G. K. Chesterton
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.
– G. K. Chesterton
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
– G. K. Chesterton
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
– G. K. Chesterton
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
– G. K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
– G. K. Chesterton
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
– G. K. Chesterton
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.
– G. K. Chesterton
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
– G. K. Chesterton
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
– G. K. Chesterton
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
– G. K. Chesterton
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
– G. K. Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
– G. K. Chesterton
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
– G. K. Chesterton
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
– G. K. Chesterton
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
– G. K. Chesterton
He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.
– G. K. Chesterton
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.
– G. K. Chesterton