Father Brown

"“But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quite simple fact—some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification comes in covering it up, in leading men's thoughts away from it.”"

"“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it.”"

"“Have you ever noticed this—that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean—or what they think you mean”"

""Reverend sir," cried Angus, standing still, "are you raving mad, or am I?" "You are not mad," said Brown, "only a little unobservant."

"Ten false philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe."

"…Oh, let me be silly a little. You don't know how unhappy I have been. And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all. Only a little lunacy, perhaps—and who minds that?"

"You have to know something of the mind as well as the body," answered the priest; "we have to know something of the body as well as the mind."

"The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil) instead of indirectly through nature or human wills."

"I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous."

"…Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."

"“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”"

"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart"

"We are taught that if a man has really bad first principles, that must be partly his fault. But, for all that, we can make some difference between a man who insults his quite clear conscience and a man with a conscience more or less clouded with sophistries."

"After the first silence the small man said to the other: "Where does a wise man hide a pebble?" And the tall man answered in a low voice: "On the beach." The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf?" And the other answered: "In the forest.""

"... when the priest said again: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?" "Well, well," cried Flambeau irritably, "what does he do?" "He grows a forest to hide it in," said the priest in an obscure voice. "A fearful sin.""

"Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?"

"Private lives are more important than public reputations. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury their dead."

"One is never thinking of the real sorrow," said the strange priest. "One can only be kind when it comes."

"There's a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight," answered the other. "What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end."

"No machine can lie," said Father Brown; "nor can it tell the truth."

"What we all dread most," said the priest in a low voice, "is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare."

"Mere figure and gait, however distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face quite close."

"If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it."

"Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was the map of this river."

"I was sea-sick," said Father Brown simply. "I felt simply horrible. But feeling horrible has nothing to do with not seeing things."

"But consider. The more a man feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty spaces round him, and they are just what make him obvious."

"The more alone he is, the more certain he is to be seen."

""Real madmen," explained Father Brown, "always encourage their own morbidity. They never strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when there aren't any. You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever wants." "And what is that?" "You want to be proved wrong," said Brown."

"We can direct our moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things."

"There is only one enemy," said Father Brown, "whom it is easier to kill with a dagger than a sword." "I know," said the woman. "Oneself."

"...but one often has to choose between feeling a damned fool and being one."

"Human science can never be quite certain of things like that," said Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over his head, "if only because of the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is a weapon? People have been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles, probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon—until it was fired into him, of course."

"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen."

"If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him."

"One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling."

"His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million."

"Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities."

"Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?"

"I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."

"Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil."

"One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."

"Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue."

"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."

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

"...If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."

"I know that journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."

"I don’t believe in anything," answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. "I'm a man of science."

"I don't believe in anything; I'm a journalist," answered the melancholy being—“Boon, of the Daily Wire. ..."

"No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."

"If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it."

"For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven."

"She hasn't got any intellect to speak of; but you don't need any intellect to be an intellectual."

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."