It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flas...
It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.
It is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies.... Compared with this life, all public life, all fame, all wisdom, is by its nature cramped and cold and small. For...
Is that all? asked Flambeau after a long pause. Have we got to the dull truth at last?Oh, no, said Father Brown.As the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of mockery Father Br...
In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.
In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
If you let loose a law, it willdo as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Suchsense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled.
If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich more fit to govern them? On the ordinary environment argument the matter i...
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.
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 had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right...
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.
I do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion?...
I can hardly conceive of any educated man believing in God at all without believing that God contains in Himself every perfection including eternal joy; and does not require the solar system to entert...
I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything,
I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.
I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular.
He discovered the fact that all romantics know—that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.
For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while...
Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.