Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a sh...
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...
But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.
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, 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.
Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
He asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't
He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.
He spoke in that sweet and steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practiced for hours together in his bedroom.
He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively...
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.
I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking on his soul, and denying its dependence on Go...
I have been asked to explain what I meant by saying that Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. I have no notion when I said it or where I said it, or even whether I said it; in the sense tha...
I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used.
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 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 told Mr. Rook you were disinherited and he rushed back to help you. Mr. Rook is a rather remarkable person.Oh, chuck it, said Mr. Rook with a hostile air.Mr. Rook is a monster, said Father Brown wit...
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly...
If [things] seem to have a relative unreality ... it is because they are potential and not actual; they are unfulfilled ... They have it in them to be more real than they are.
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...
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