He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not...

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man...

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost...

The DonkeyWhen fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn,Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born.With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings,The devil’s walking...

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...

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry...

The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it,...

the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.” “There again,” said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say...

I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or...

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles – they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all...

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

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.

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...

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

For most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He...

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

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

Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible...

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.

If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(…) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same...

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.

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

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These...

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body,...

The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of...

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

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: thatpeople do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it mayor may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only...

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon...

Paradox – Truth standing on her head to get attention.

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...

He is a man, I think,” he said, “who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.”Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth.”Dangerous!” he said. “You don’t...

…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...

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

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities...

And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a...

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

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...

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of...

{We} have not to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule; rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can’t.

There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market-gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very...