You shouldn’t shoot people,” said Lord Caterham in a tone of mild remonstrance. “You shouldn’t really. I daresay some of them richly deserve it – but all the same it will lead to trouble.
It is a fundamental axiom of married life that you must lie to a woman. She likes it!
The history of the marriage was short and painful. To put it bluntly, Mrs Ackroyd was a dipsomaniac. She succeeded in drinking herself into her grave four years after her marriage.
Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.
I have had too much experience of life to believe in the infallibility of doctors. Some of them are clever men and some of them are not, and half the time the best of them don’t know what is the matter with you.
Not instinct, Hastings. Instinct is a bad word. It is my knowledge – my experience – that tells me that something about that letter is wrong –.
Murder develops. Yes, like a photograph, isn’t it?
I, too, believe in the force of superstition, one of the greatest forces the world has ever known.
Getting soft – that’s the curse of the present day.
Popular feeling is very often sentimental, muddle-headed, and eminently unsound, but it cannot be disregarded for all that.
She must lead a very quiet life. No exertion. No fatigue. But, of course, she must not be allowed to brood. She must be kept cheerful and the mind well distracted.
The subjects of them did not look tragic. They looked, actually, rather ridiculous, since nearly all of them were dressed in the style of a bygone day, and nothing is more ridiculous than the fashions of yesterday – though in another thirty years or so their charm may have reappeared, or at any rate be once more apparent.
So long as you didn’t expect her to talk. He thanked his stars he wasn’t married to her. Once you got used to all that perfection of face and form where would you be? She couldn’t even listen intelligently. The sort of girl who would expect you to tell her every morning at the breakfast table that you loved her passionately!
Always going off somewhere. Dams, you know. I’m not swearing, my dear,” he assured his wife. “I mean jobs to do with the building of dams, or else it’s oil or pipelines or something like that.
In my day if a man was mad he was mad and we didn’t look about for scientific terms to soften it down.
Success had its penalties.
If the foundations are rotten – everything’s rotten.
Madame, the most kind, the most amiable are not always the cleverest.
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.
A beautiful stone is only a beautiful stone. It doesn’t lead you anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything, it has no form or significance until is has its setting. And the setting has to have a beautiful jewel to be worthy of it.