The Secret of Father Brown quotes

Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions.

Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection.

Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate address: in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid though relatively small;

“

You see, it was I who killed all those people.

”

“No, no, no,” he said, almost angrily. “I don’t mean just a figure of speech. This is what comes of trying to talk about deep things. … What’s the good of words? …

If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical.

A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other sense could you believe it?’

It’s like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well, what you call ‘the secret’ is exactly the opposite.

I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer.

… Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions;

They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his ‘criminal skull’ as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose.

When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour.

I don’t deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of what we know.

“Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion,” answered the cleric. “You see, I entered it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem to be almost the only person who did.

All the best people seem to get over garden walls nowadays.

”

“Well,” said Father Brown, looking at him with limpid gravity, “

I came in by the front door. I often come into houses that way.

”

If there were any educated people in court, who know what literature is, they would have known well enough whether he had had anything genuine to do.

You’d have asked a manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but nobody seems to consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It’s done by doing nothing.

”

But do you expect him to tell you that in the witness-box? What would you say to him if he did? You talk about a man having a jury of his peers.

Why don’t you have a jury of poets?

”

“Thank your stars I’m not,” said Father Brown. “

Thank your lucky stars a priest has to be more charitable than a poet.

Lord have mercy on us, if you knew what a crushing, what a cruel contempt he feels for the lot of you, you’d feel as if you were under Niagara.”

“

A queer thing is a mirror; a picture frame that holds hundreds of different pictures, all vivid and all vanished forever.

Yet, there was something specially strange about the glass that hung at the end of that grey corridor under that green palm.

There was his daughter, Opal, who was also thin and dark and supposed to be psychic—at any rate, by herself; for she had little domestic encouragement.

Spirits of an ardently astral turn will be well advised not to materialize as members of a large family.

There was her brother John, a burly youth, particularly boisterous in his indifference to her spiritual development; and otherwise distinguishable only by his interest in motorcars. He seemed to be always in the act of selling one car and buying another;

“I mean it was a dead man who looked in at the window,” said Father Brown. “It was a dead man who crawled round more than one house, looking in at more than one window. Creepy, wasn’t it?

But in one way it was the reverse of a ghost; for it was not the antic of the soul freed from the body. It was the antic of the body freed from the soul.

”

It would have been like hiding; and he was not hiding. He was not hiding from God; he was not hiding from himself. He was in the broad daylight. If they’d taken him back to prison, he’d still have been quite happy.

He was not whitewashed, but washed white.

There was something very strange about him; almost as strange as the grotesque dance of death through which he was dragged after he was dead.

“I beg your pardon,” he said rousing himself with a sudden smile. “

I had forgotten we were talking with words. In the east we talk with thoughts, and so we never misunderstand each other.

It is strange how you people worship words and are satisfied with words. What difference does it make to a thing that you now call it telepathy, as you once called it tomfoolery?

“I have a sympathy with the tribe,” said Father Brown. “

A Philistine is only a man who is right without knowing why.

”

“Perhaps,” said Father Brown with a smile, “you would like to speak without words, as the Count suggests.

He would begin by saying nothing in a pointed fashion, and you would retort with a burst of taciturnity.

”

“There is one general truth to remember,” said Father Brown, after a pause. “

A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man cannot see himself.

There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon.

By creating a mysterious magician from the end of the earth, he set everybody’s thoughts wandering far afield to Arabia and India, so that you yourself can hardly believe that the whole thing was so near home.

It was too close to you to be seen.

”

“Jameson did not expect the doors to be barred,” said Father Brown. “He knew that a lot of men, especially careless men like you and your employer, could go on saying for days that something ought to be done, or might as well be done.

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

”

“Do you really mean,” cried Jarvis, “that the strange woman who haunted him like a ghost was only the Mrs. Mandeville we know?” But he received no answer; for Father Brown was staring into vacancy with a blank expression almost like an idiot’s.

He always did look most idiotic at the instant when he was most intelligent.

The next moment he scrambled to his feet looking very harassed and distressed. “This is awful,” he said. “I’m not sure it isn’t the worst business I ever had. But I’ve got to go through with it. Would you go and ask Mrs.

“An egoist,” said Father Brown. “

She was the sort of person who had looked in the mirror before looking out of the window, and it is the worst calamity of mortal life.

The looking-glass was unlucky for her, all right; but rather because it wasn’t broken.”

And there was another thing, even then. You laughed when I said that the sulky look of Mrs. Sands was a study in character; but not in the character of Mrs. Sands. But it was true.

If you want to know what a lady is really like, don’t look at her; for she may be too clever for you.

Don’t look at the men round her, for they may be too silly about her. But look at some other woman who is always near to her, and especially one who is under her. You will see in that mirror her real face;

“The face really is smiling,” said Father Brown, soberly; “which is perhaps not the least part of the riddle.

Not many men smile while their throats are being cut, even if they do it themselves.

That smile, combined with those gooseberry eyes of his, that always seemed standing out of his head, is enough, no doubt, to explain the expression. But it’s true, things look different upside down. Artists often turn their drawings upside down to test their correctness.

“It is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at all uncommon,” replied the other. “

Half modern politics consists of rich men blackmailing people.

Your notion that it’s nonsense rests on two illusions which are both nonsensical. One is, that rich men never want to be richer; the other is, that a man can only be blackmailed for money. It’s the last that is in question here.

Granby, the greatness of a great house and history is something more than these accidental individuals who carry it on, even though they do not grace it. From father to son our heritage has come down, and from father to son it shall continue.

You may assure yourselves, gentlemen, and you may assure my son, that I shall not leave my money to a home for lost cats. Musgrave shall leave it to Musgrave till the heavens fall.

”

“Only the other day I was just going to tell my niece that there are two types of men who can laugh when they are alone. One might almost say the man who does it is either very good or very bad.

You see, he is either confiding the joke to God or confiding it to the Devil.

But anyhow he has an inner life. Well, there really is a kind of man who confides the joke to the Devil. He does not mind if nobody sees the joke; if nobody can safely be allowed even to know the joke.

That is what I mean by the infernal irony; by the joke shared with the Devil. Shall I tell you something that sounds like what they call a paradox?

Sometimes it is a joy in the very heart of hell to tell the truth.

And, above all, to tell it so that everybody misunderstands it. That is why he liked that antic of pretending to be somebody else, and then painting himself as black—as he was.

“Our prejudices seem to cut opposite ways,” said Father Brown. “You excuse his being brown because he is brahminical; and I excuse his being brahminical because he is brown.

Frankly, I don’t care for spiritual powers much myself. I’ve got much more sympathy with spiritual weaknesses.

But I can’t see why anybody should dislike him merely because he is the same beautiful colour as copper, or coffee, or nut-brown ale, or those jolly peat-streams in the North.

“Now, don’t tell me you’re going to be silly,” said Lady Mounteagle. “That’s just what we meant; to link up the great religions of East and West; Buddha and Christ. Surely you must understand that all religions are really the same.”

“If they are,” said Father Brown mildly, “it seems rather unnecessary to go into the middle of Asia to get one.”

“Lady Mounteagle means that they are different aspects or facets, as there are of this stone,” began Hardcastle; and becoming interested in the new topic, laid the great ruby down on the stone sill or ledge under the Gothic arch.

After a pause he went on thoughtfully. “Right away back in that argument of theirs, by the tents, I knew things were going wrong. People will tell you that theories don’t matter and that logic and philosophy aren’t practical. Don’t you believe them.

Reason is from God, and when things are unreasonable there is something the matter.

Now, that quite abstract argument ended with something funny. Consider what the theories were. Hardcastle was a trifle superior and said that all things were perfectly possible; but they were mostly done merely by mesmerism, or clairvoyance;

The man who really did it would never want us to think he did it, for he also was an English gentleman.

He was also something very much better; he was a Christian thief.

I hope and believe he was a penitent thief.”

All religions are the same, says Lady Mounteagle. Are they, by George! I tell you some of them are so different that the best man of one creed will be callous, where the worst man of another will be sensitive.

I told you I didn’t like spiritual power, because the accent is on the word power.

I don’t say the Master would steal a ruby; very likely he wouldn’t; very likely he wouldn’t think it worth stealing. It wouldn’t be specially his temptation to take jewels;

And he didn’t wear a mask, at least, he didn’t wear it with me. He wasn’t a leper, though he may be almost as lonely.

And he had only one head and only one heart, and that was broken.

”

“If he is,” replied the general, “I don’t see why you should come to me about it. I ought to tell you I’m a strong Protestant.”

“I’m very fond of strong Protestants,” said Father Brown. “I came to you because I was sure you would tell the truth. I hope it is not uncharitable to feel less sure of Sir John Cockspur.”

The brown eyes twinkled again, but the general said nothing.

“General,” he almost whispered, “for God’s sake don’t let your wife and that other woman insist on seeing Marne again.

Let sleeping dogs lie, or you’ll unleash all the hounds of hell.

”

“and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner.

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.”

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.

”