. . . metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing.
I don't deny, he said, that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, a...
Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on t...
He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he...
Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. Yes, he said, I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to b...
Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference – Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity,...
Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed: a passage which some have considered as a prophecy of modern journalism.
As enunciated today, progress is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.
Angus...had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental hygiene...
And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a...
And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people (engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite unprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without fulfil...
All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.
A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he compreh...
The fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
Just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,—just as we know, when we see weeds...
Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found...
Father Brown: ... one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place
Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they...
But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing a man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is.