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."

"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"

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

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"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."

"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?"

"Theres 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."

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

"…Oh, let me be silly a little. You dont 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?"