Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.

If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it.

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

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defense of life; that would delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do...

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the...

Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between...

The man who said, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,” put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall...

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

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

The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong. However, he’s often wrong about what is right.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the...

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages,...

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit...

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

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

Can you not see, […] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul...

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or...

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.

…this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

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...

The dreadful joy Thy Son has sentIs heavier than any care;We find, as Cain his punishment,Our pardon more than we can bear.

Without the family, we are helpless before the State.

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...

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...

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...

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...