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Who really said it

Art, Like Morality, Consists of Drawing the Line Somewhere

Written by G. K. Chesterton 1874–1936 · English journalist, novelist & essayist
Verified Free to reuse

Chesterton wrote the sentence in “Our Note Book,” his weekly column in The Illustrated London News, published 5 May 1928. The wording that circulates today is his exact printed wording — the sentence appears verbatim in the scanned original issue, under his byline. It is not Oscar Wilde’s.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Art, Like Morality, Consists of Drawing the Line Somewhere” G. K. Chesterton, "Our Note Book," The Illustrated London News, 5 May 1928, p. 780. Frequently misattributed to Oscar Wilde.

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Provenance

The source

Work
“Our Note Book,” The Illustrated London News
Published
5 May 1928 · page 780
Author
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
Earlier form
“it consists in drawing the line somewhere” — same column, 5 June 1920

Some say that art is unmoral; and some of these arts are very unmoral. I may not have described them here in the correct conventional terms; but then I do not think that art is unmoral. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. “Our Note Book,” 5 May 1928

The passage sits in a column mocking the publishing fashion for “Outline of…” books that followed H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History — Chesterton’s joke being that the Outliners are the last people who want an actual outline. The transcription above is Quote Investigator’s; it matches the machine-read text of the scanned issue word for word.

Scanned magazine issue
The Illustrated London News, 5 May 1928 (Vol. 172, Iss. 4646)
The Illustrated London News, 5 May 1928 — scanned issue

How we verified this

  • 5 June 1920 — Chesterton first reaches for the idea in the same column, writing that the citizen’s power “is like the power of the artist; it consists in drawing the line somewhere.” The sentence is in the scanned issue ↗, under his byline.
  • 5 May 1928 — eight years later he sharpens it into the line people quote. The scanned issue ↗ carries the sentence in a column headed “By G. K. CHESTERTON.”
  • Traced — Quote Investigator ↗ assembles the chronology and concludes that Chesterton originated the statement printed in The Illustrated London News in 1928. The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton ↗ gives the same citation.
  • Today — a reworded version travels under Oscar Wilde’s name. The Quotations Page ↗ still credits “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace” to Wilde, with no source given.
Public domain

The sentence was first published on 5 May 1928, in that week’s Illustrated London News. Works first published before 1931 are in the public domain in the United States, so this text may be quoted freely. Note that modern edited collections of Chesterton’s columns carry their own editorial copyright — the 1928 periodical text does not.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Why people say Oscar Wilde

This is a Wilde-magnet sentence: epigrammatic, faintly naughty, built on a pun. So it drifted to Wilde — but in a reworded form, and with no source behind it anywhere.

Oscar Wilde No evidence

Quote Investigator states plainly that there is no substantive evidence Oscar Wilde said or wrote this statement, and that a variant was constructed and incorrectly assigned to him — see the full chronology ↗. Wilde died in 1900; the sentence was printed in 1928.

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace” Rewritten

This Americanised rewrite — clauses swapped, “someplace” for “somewhere” — is the form that circulates under Wilde’s name. The Quotations Page ↗ and Goodreads ↗ both list it as Wilde’s with no work cited.

Chesterton, slightly misquoted Variant

Plenty of reprints give “consists in drawing the line.” The 1928 column reads “consists of”; “consists in” is the construction Chesterton used in his 1920 column ↗, which may be why the two forms blur together.

It is Chesterton’s, and the paper trail is short: “Our Note Book,” The Illustrated London News, 5 May 1928 — readable in the scanned original ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

The line is a pun, and the pun is the whole argument. An artist literally draws lines; a moralist figuratively draws one. Chesterton’s point is that these are the same act — that choosing what to leave out is not a failure of nerve but the thing that makes a work a work at all. Anyone can be limitless. Only a form has edges.

He was writing that week about the publishing craze for “Outline of…” books, set off by H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History. Chesterton found it funny that the word outline had become a favourite of exactly the people least willing to accept a definite limit — and the sentence lands as the sting in that joke, not as a detached aphorism.

An artist draws a line. So does a conscience. Chesterton thought that was the same sentence.

How he came to it

Chesterton had circled the idea eight years earlier. In his column of 5 June 1920 he wrote that the citizen’s power “is like the power of the artist; it consists in drawing the line somewhere” — the same analogy, aimed at citizenship rather than morality, and not yet compressed.

He wrote this column weekly for decades. Wikipedia records that a weekly column in The Illustrated London News followed in 1905, “for which he continued to write for the next 30 years.” Most of those pieces were never collected in his lifetime, which is part of why so many Chesterton lines float free of any citation — and why they are so easy to reassign to someone more famous for epigrams.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Wisdom Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation — dated attestations from 1920 onward, and the finding that Chesterton, not Wilde, originated the line.
The Illustrated London News, 5 May 1928archive.org

The scanned original issue containing the sentence in Chesterton's bylined column.
The Illustrated London News, 5 June 1920archive.org

The scanned issue carrying the earlier form, 'it consists in drawing the line somewhere.'
Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton — Art and Literaturechesterton.org

The Chesterton society's own quotation file, citing the line to Illustrated London News, May 5, 1928.
The Quotations Page — the Wilde versionquotationspage.com

A live example of the misattribution: the reworded line credited to Oscar Wilde with no source.
G. K. Chestertonen.wikipedia.org

Biography, life dates, and the record of his thirty-year Illustrated London News column.

The true author

Who was G. K. Chesterton?

G. K. Chesterton

1874–1936 · English journalist, novelist & essayist

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English journalist, novelist, essayist and poet, born 29 May 1874 and died 14 June 1936. He is best remembered for the Father Brown detective stories and for books like Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday, but he made his living as a working columnist — a weekly column in The Illustrated London News from 1905 that he kept up for some three decades. That enormous, largely uncollected output is why so many of his best sentences circulate as orphan epigrams, and why they so often end up filed under a wittier-sounding name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Chesterton, G. K. “Our Note Book.” The Illustrated London News, May 5, 1928, 780.

This verification page

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