"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." - G. K. Chesterton

This quote gets a lot of comments if you do some research. The quote, without the authors name, typed into google yields 195,000 results.

Like a lot of quotes attributed to specific people, there seem to be a lot of opinions as to whether the quotes are accurate. Sometimes you can find the author that the quote was supposed to have been made by has a more complete example or comments that corrects the misstated quote.

G.K. Chesterton wrote the book Orthodoxy in 1908, considered a classic of Christian apologetic, explaining the reasons why he had come to be a believer. Chesterton has been often misquoted and the quote above is a good example but a more likely way he would have intended it to be is:

“These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly” (Orthodoxy, 1908).

Chesterton’s point here is not that things worth doing are worth doing badly but that some things one must do oneself, however badly they are done. The best way to learn is by doing.

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