Quotations by G. K. Chesterton

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people."

0 comments | 3631 views

"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."

0 comments | 4917 views

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

0 comments | 4626 views

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

0 comments | 1446 views

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

0 comments | 2516 views

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

0 comments | 4281 views

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

0 comments | 593 views

"I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles."

0 comments | 1358 views

"Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution."

0 comments | 4003 views

"The classes that wash most are those that work least."

0 comments | 3254 views

"A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence."

0 comments | 1968 views

"Nowadays a citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter."

0 comments | 3900 views

"Coincidences are spiritual puns."

0 comments | 2462 views

"The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents."

0 comments | 4692 views

"What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read."

0 comments | 5019 views

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

0 comments | 2277 views

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."

0 comments | 514 views

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

0 comments | 1720 views

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

0 comments | 1869 views

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

0 comments | 3889 views

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

0 comments | 5028 views

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

0 comments | 796 views

""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.""

0 comments | 4098 views

"One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly."

0 comments | 2998 views

"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 it his head that splits."

0 comments | 1109 views

"Nietzche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them."

0 comments | 1828 views

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

0 comments | 4963 views

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

0 comments | 5228 views

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

0 comments | 1962 views

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

0 comments | 1730 views

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

0 comments | 3395 views

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

0 comments | 732 views

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

0 comments | 5307 views

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

0 comments | 416 views

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

0 comments | 5131 views

"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."

0 comments | 3856 views

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

0 comments | 1765 views

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

0 comments | 354 views

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

0 comments | 330 views

"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."

0 comments | 1571 views

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."

0 comments | 3820 views

"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."

0 comments | 4678 views

"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."

0 comments | 5202 views

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

0 comments | 3142 views

"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."

0 comments | 913 views

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

0 comments | 2709 views

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

0 comments | 1886 views

"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."

0 comments | 2178 views

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

0 comments | 653 views

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

0 comments | 2910 views

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