A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head...
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
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.
Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England.
When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.
Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad, replied Syme with perfect calm; but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.
We matter to God — God only knows why.
Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen...
There is a limit to human charity, said Lady Outram, trembling all over.There is, said Father Brown dryly, and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive...
The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.
The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle, pursued the policeman. The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.
The sages have a hundred maps to giveThat trace their crawling cosmos like a treeThey rattle reason out through many a sieveThat stores the sand but lets the gold go free
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The adoration of Christ had been a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, in that sense may be said to begi...
The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far m...
Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter,...
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that...
Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creat...
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brot...