"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."
"Coincidences are spiritual puns."
"There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect."
"For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread."
"All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."
"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
"When [a politician] is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it. In short, when he is impotent he proves to us that the thing is easy; and when he is omnipotent he proves that it is impossible."
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem."
"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost."
"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."
"A good novel tells you the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author."
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
"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."
"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
"Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades."
"The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold."
"It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall downÖ. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."
"The Scandal of Father Brown (1935), ‘The Point of a Pin’ One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."
"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache."
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."
"Courage is almost always a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."
"Silence is the unbearable repartee."
"Dogmatism does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought."