Quotes from book
The Secret of Father Brown

The Secret of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton

Father Brown, an unassuming and shabbily dressed priest, possesses an incredible ability to solve crimes and murders. Here he reveals the secret of his success. This fourth collection contains the magnificent 'The Chief Mourner of Marne'- a fascinating story with unexpected twists - about a duel and a case of mistaken identity.

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“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.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Secret of Father Brown

The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)
Source: The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Chief Mourner of Marne

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“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.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Secret of Father Brown

The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Secret of Father Brown
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

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

G. K. Chesterton book The Secret of Father Brown

The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Song of the Flying Fish
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

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