G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Quotes

• There nearly always is a method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

• The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation, and admired for the wrong reasons.

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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...

• 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.