Quotes from G. K. Chesterton

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

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

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.

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

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

Fairy Tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

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

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.

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.

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.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

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

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

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

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

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

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.

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

To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

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

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.

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

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.