G. K. Chesterton

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

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

The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.
G. K. Chesterton - Heretics (1905)
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

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.

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

"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."

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.

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.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
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.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

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

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

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

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
G. K. Chesterton - The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
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.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
G. K. Chesterton - Defendant (1901)
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.

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

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 - "Heretics", 1905
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

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

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

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

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.

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 - Orthodoxy; p. 14
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

A dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing can go against it.
G. K. Chesterton - Defendant (1901)
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
G. K. Chesterton - Flying Inn (1914)
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

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

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

- G. K. Chesterton