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.

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

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

Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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