"An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity."

"In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it."

"The real difference between Francis and Dominic, which is no discredit to either of them, is that Dominic did happen to be confronted with a huge campaign for the conversion of heretics, while Francis had only the more subtle task of the conversion of human beings."

"The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us."

"Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes."

"For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy."

"As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind."

"You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you."

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

"Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard."

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read."

"Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion."

"There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over."There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven."

"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain."

"Saint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one's own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint's name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured."

"Marriage is an adventure, like going to war."

"All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change."

"The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress-that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what."

"That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem."

"...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy."

"The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing."

"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.But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you haveforgotten to put into it."

"Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality."

"I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification."

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."

"No man can be merry unless he is serious."

"The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else."

"The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it."

"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."

"One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak."

"...it is the fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seems to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers."

"In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood."

"When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read."

"The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's."

"The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic."

"One definition occurred to both of them-that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods."

"The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. Because he bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that holds the roof over his head. he industriously removes the obstacle; and in return the obstacle removes him; and much more valuable things than he."

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

"There nearly always is a method in madness."

"Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy."

"You say you are a poet of law, I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden."

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

"Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."

"Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave."

"Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know."

"I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller."

"We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God."

"Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism."

"The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations."

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."