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G. K. Chesterton Quotations

We found 41 matching quotations.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
G. K. Chesterton - Heretics (1905)
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton - Defendant (1901)
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and not tried.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
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.
G. K. Chesterton - The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals...
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
A dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing can go against it.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
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 - Orthodoxy
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
English author & mystery novelist
1874 - 1936

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