If ever I murdered somebody, he added quite simply, I dare say it might be an Optimist.
If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Da...
I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own. I shall say, The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe. He will say, The celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume. He will say in the most ex...
I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.
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 don't want the universe broken up just yet, drawled the Marquis. I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday in bed.
He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.
He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.
For even the most dehumanized modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.
Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of vi...
Every man is dangerous, said the old man without moving, who cares only for one thing.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. He that will lose his life, the same shall save it, is not a piece of mysticism for...
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.
But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is t...
But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.
Before we congratulate ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are we without the fault because we ha...
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...
And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.
A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter,...