During the last fortnight I have received a very unusual number of long letters from total strangers; some people profess to dislike receiving such long letters; I confess myself that I wallow in them. The only letters I dislike are short letters; they are generally so painfully practical. But long letters only come from two classes of men, and those two are the only interesting and admirable classes of men - our friends and our foes [...] Some of those numerous people who are ready to attack Christianity for anything or nothing have said somewhat more plausibly than usual that it is unreasonable to ask a man to love his enemies. I do not think many people have such lovable enemies as I have.

My controversial opponents treat me extraordinarily nicely; considering that through sheer laziness I always say what I think, and through extreme hurry always say it with unnecessary violence. My enemies and I understand each other; we know that it is not so very difficult to love your enemies so long as you are always hitting them.

-April 13, 1907, Daily News

`My position is simple,' replied the priest. `I am here to look after the legitimate interests of my friend Halket. I think it will be in his interest, under the circumstances, if I tell you I think he will before long sever his connexion with this organization, and cease to be a Socialist in that sense. I have every reason to believe he will probably end as a Catholic.'

`Halket!' exploded the other incredulously. `Why he curses priests from morning till night!'

`I don't think you quite understand that kind of man,' said Father Brown mildly. 'He curses priests for failing (in his opinion) to defy the whole world for justice. Why should he expect them to defy the whole world for justice, unless he had already begun to assume they were--what they are?

-The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926)

The real hero is not he who is bold enough to fulfill the predictions, but he who is bold enough to falsify them.

-Tales of the Long Bow (1925)

What is wrong with modern journalism is not the great mass that it reveals, but the great mass that it refuses to reveal [...] it [is] the secrecy of journalism, the sudden silences of journalism. The daily paper does not ruin the country by publishing dreadful revelations; it ruins the country by refusing to publish dreadful revelations, because they are really dreadful.

-October 28, 1905, Daily News

[T]ruth is a living fact. A truth is a fact that can talk; a fact that is conscious of other facts; a fact that can explain itself.

-July 2, 1910, Daily News

Arts die of a false emphasis, which is generally the effect of fatigue. The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint-or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint. I admit that sometimes, in Rubens or Rabelais, it might be called a broad hint; but it it is always a suggestion, even when it is an absurd suggestion. It always opens the vista of liberty that does not need to go all its own lengths. But there is a kind of dull exaggeration that is the very opposite of this light emphasis. And in this respect there is not much to choose between the large haloes of the old Crucifixion and the long hands of the modern Crucifixion. In both there is the weakness of stressing what strength would be content to suggest. In both a man who might have spoken to us, when he was alert and lively, is shouting at us because he is tired. And some of us may say, in the popular phrase, that it makes us tired to be shouted at. I can see what Michael Angelo means when he seems to make a limb unusually long; or what Giotto means when he seems to make a figure unusually stiff. And when an artist implies that I shall not see what he means unless he lengthens limbs in the manner of the modern Crucifixion, or stiffens them in the manner of the portrait of an Englishwoman, I feel as if a man two feet away were talking at the top of his voice on the assumption that I am stone deaf.

-March 10, 1923, Illustrated London News

Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

-The Thing (1929)

But I remember having in my mind in childhood a simple and logical question, which could not be answered then and cannot be answered now. It arose from my reading stories about shipwrecks and desert islands which contained accounts of starving men found floating on rafts or pining on rocks in mid-ocean. The horrors of their pain and loneliness were very vivid to me; but the moment that they saw a sail or came across a human foot-print I knew that all was well. Their fellow-men would receive them with prompt and reassuring assistance, boats would be lowered for them, brandy would be poured down their throats, food and fire and a voyage home were what they had to look forward to for the time with an equal mind. All this was right and simple to me, since men were a band of brothers sworn to fight the half-witted giants of seas and land. But the thing I could not understand then and cannot understand now was that this chivalrous fraternity that plucked its members out of the jaws of the sea and from the crevasses of the cruel mountains allowed people to stand about the London streets quite obviously in the condition of people requiring medical assistance and close to inanition and death. Why was there something so sacred about a raft and so unimportant about a street? Why did these rescuers who could find lost explorers at the Pole and half-drowned men in the wreck of 'The Princess Alice' not bring themselves to march to and discover and explore that wild and dark and far-off city in which I happen to be born? 

-December 12, 1902, Daily News

When children ask inconvenient questions it is the custom to say to them, 'When you are older you will understand'; a reply, generally speaking, justifying parricide. But the answer is not merely irritating; it is generally, I am sorry to say, a lie. The questions asked by children, as a rule, are questions that do not depend upon any matter of age: they are simple and unanswerable questions. When we grow up we rise superior to them, not by answering them, but merely by giving them up. Logically, the parents ought only to say, 'When you are older you will not want to understand'; though it may certainly be said that if the first version of the reply would justify parricide on the part of the child the second version might justify suicide on his part.

-December 12, 1902, Daily News

[M]ere knowledge as such does not bring one any nearer truth just as mere size has nothing to do with balance or lack of balance.

-January 6, 1903, Daily News

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.

-The Everlasting Man (1925)

We must remember that the whole discovery of reading is new to great classes of the community [..] It is not strictly true to say that any of their reading is bad; for it is entirely good that there is an ingenious code of signals by which are conveyed to them the inmost thoughts and secrets of men long in their graves. It is not true, strictly speaking, that any of the fiction they read is bad for it is altogether a good thing that they should. in any shape or form, live that mystical double life that separates man from the beasts, one life in the daily duty of selfishness, the other in that strange and fantastic unselfishness which makes the fate of some non-existent hero, the creature of an idle brain, almost as important as our own [...] These things are not, in the proper meaning of the word, bad, any more than a man is bad for not being Shakespeare, or a hill bad for not being Mount Everest.

-June 8, 1901, The Speaker