Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
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 will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.
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 unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long storiesβ¦cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
La sua logica Γ¨ straordinariamente lucida e fredda e invariabilmente lo porta fuori strada. Ma all'improvviso interviene la poesia in lui a riportarlo in carreggiata.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.
I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
