"All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed."

"White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white."

"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."

"When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress."

"It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam."

"Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."

"The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock, but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive."

"A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men."

"Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."

"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side."

"The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself."

"Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised."

"Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem"."

"Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find-the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child."

"It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a fewgreat hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it istyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing."

"Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon."

"Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place."

"I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime."

"We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other but what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred for the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity's to the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon someone who never lived at all."

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."

"The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it for the hundredth time we call it, in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of Wordsworth, "the light of common day." We are inclined to increase our claims. We are inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue sun, to demand a green sun. Humility is perpetually putting us back in the primal darkness. There all light is lightning, startling and instantaneous. Until we understand that original dark, in which we have neither sight nor expectation, we can give no hearty and childlike praise to the splendid sensationalism of things."

"There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect."

"In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting , to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself."

"We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty."

"But when i¬rst the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the ei¬€ect of all miracles " they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know " that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the cord of monotony is stretched most tight, it it breaks with a sound like song."

"The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life."

"To be simple is the best thing in the world."

"...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These 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 run with water."

"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."

"I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person."

"There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect."

"Love means to love that which is unlovable or it is no virtue at all."

"To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once."

"Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told."

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

"Of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong."

"If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God."

"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."

"Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."

"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

"Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump, you may be freeing him from being a camel."

"The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it."

"There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as the enormous importance attached to immediate victory."

"New roads new ruts."

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."

"Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity."

"Half a truth is better than no politics."

"If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride."

"There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing."