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.

About G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English Christian apologist writer. Chesterton's wit, paradoxical style, and defence of tradition made him a dominant figure in early 20th-century literature.

More quotations from G. K. Chesterton

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

—G. K. Chesterton

being identity

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

—G. K. Chesterton

Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further still and find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

—G. K. Chesterton

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

—G. K. Chesterton

perception perspective travel returning

Beware of no man more than yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

—G. K. Chesterton

enemies self

More quotations tagged with “popularity”

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.

—Gerald W. Johnson

heroism myth popularity hero worship

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

—Harper Lee

democracy conscience popularity

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.

—Clarence Darrow

experience popularity courage bravery

However fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, thinks and lives fashionably; virtue and honor will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honor will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so.

—Robertson Davies

love virtue future knowledge world popularity despair sacrifice present journalism honor

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

—Robert Frost

politics perception change popularity