G. K. Chesterton

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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. "

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

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

"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. "

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

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

"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. "

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

"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. "

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

"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. "

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

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

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

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

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