GK Chesterton (1874-1936)

Quotes

• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

• Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

• At least five times...with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died.

• 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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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

• It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed. For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more than a Nihilist must sympathize with one version of nature or the other.

• In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

• Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

• 'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

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

• A yawn is a silent shout.

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

• Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

• Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?

• The only right way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning--at the beginning of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way for the sake of brevity.

• There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.