"Ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal."

"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."

"There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

"Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers."

"Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position."

"You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly."No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do."

"The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow,till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lowly they are."

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."

"The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers."

"The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world."

"Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. 'Odd, isn't it,' he said, 'that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?"

"A tragedy means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man."

"As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It."

"But it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy."

"I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin."

"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera and grace before the play and pantomime and grace before I open a book and grace before sketching painting swimming fencing boxing walking playing dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."

"I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must alwayshave been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it couldnever have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely becauseit might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it."

"A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it."

"Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."

"He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape."

"Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments."

"They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defense of life; that would delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause."

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."

"Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it."

"A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt."

"It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life."

"No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid."

"The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain and tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the seabather comes after the icy shok of the sea bath."

"Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song."

"Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle."

"Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich."

"That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child."

"The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."

"Angels fly because they take themselves lightly."

"A finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange."

"You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink."

"The criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic."

"The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head."

"It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."

"There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture."

"We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners."

"We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting."

"But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word 'artificial.' Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss."

"Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?"

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government."

"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."