In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
If ever I murdered somebody, he added quite simply, I dare say it might be an Optimist.
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 know too much, he said. That's what's the matter with me. That's what's the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too much about one another; too much about ourselves.
I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost....
For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pr...
But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest. What? asked the thief, almost gaping. You attacked reason, said Father Brown. It’s bad theology.
As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is righ...
The obvious thing to say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome if he had not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be a rather bald way of putting it. Fantastic...
[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white...
You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.
Yes, he said in a voice indescribable, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven we...
Who are you?' he asked suddenly.I'm not sure,' replied the other. 'I rather think I am your long-lost brother.'
What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.
We must have several word-signs, said Syme seriously -- words that we are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is 'coeval.' What's yours?Do stop playing the goat, said the Profess...
Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think.
There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon.