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 world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;Round us in antic order their crippled vices came—Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism...
The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...
Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.
Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.
Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist...
Perhaps I might put up my notice of warning, and warn the reader not to read the second chapter. Now I come to think of it, I might warn him not to read the book at all.
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,...
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I will not hit you if you do not hit me; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each ot...
It is you who are unpoetical, replied the poet Syme. If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing...
If the great paradox of Christianity means anything it means this- that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who fe...
If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.
I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone
I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form.