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Quotes by G. K. Chesterton

English author & mystery novelist (1874 - 1936)

The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.

I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals...

CP A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

For in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

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.

Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all nations have been ashamed of them.

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

"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."

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.

A dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing can go against it.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and not tried.

If a rhinoceros were to enter this resteraunt now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I would be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.

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.

His horror is wild, but it is a sane horror.

The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

CP Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

CP Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

CP I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.