549 Quotes by G.K. Chesterton

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

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.

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

There are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.