If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate many other people’s weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the master of the house was burned because he was drunk: it may be that the mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and perished arguing about the expense of a fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly true that they both were burned because I set fire to their house.
Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously!
The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.
You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am.” The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, “I am not; therefore I cannot think.
Father Brown tossed the paper on the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair. ‘You mustn’t let that sort of stuff stupefy you,’ he said sharply. ‘These devils always try to make us helpless by making us hopeless.
Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
Gentlemen used to lie just as schoolboys lie, because they hung together and partly to help one another out.
Mary had the solitary and heroic half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones.
He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
It was a rude and simple society and there were no laws to punish a starving man for expressing his need for food, such as have been established in a more humanitarian age; and the lack of any organised police permitted such persons to pester the wealthy without any great danger.
A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky.
For this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies in the clotted folly of Eugenics. Even if we could in the abstract breed humanity well, there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about what was considered well-bred.
I’ve known a good many magicians myself in India – mango plant and all. But the Indian ones are all frauds, I’ll swear.
Hang it all! what is a man ashamed of nowadays?
The only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will; it involves finding out that men are worse or better than they seem, and that by their own choice.
They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is – well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.
He might have heard the first whisper of that wild blessing that afterwards took the form of a blasphemy; “He listens to those to whom God himself will not listen.
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.
When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only two kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a way, conquered the weak.
I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And.