Fagin: You'd like to make pocket handkerchiefs as easily as the Artful Dodger, wouldn't you my dear?
Oliver Twist: Yes, if you teach me sir.
Fagin: We will, my dear, we will.


--Alec Guinness (as Fagin) in Oliver Twist

Father Brown: Appalling.
Flambeau: An odd word to apply to the finest private collection in the world.
Father Brown: What is appalling is that it is private.
Flambeau: You are the first person to have the privilege of seeing it. Look at my El Greco.
Father Brown: Yours?
Flambeau: Mine.
Father Brown: This, I believe, is yours.
[He hands Flambeau his cigarette case]
Flambeau: Oh. So that's how you traced me. Thank you. I wondered where I'd lost it.
Father Brown: You didn't lose it. I stole it.
Flambeau: We have something in common then.
Father Brown: All men do.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: Excuse me. Do you speak English?
Painter: Sure.
Father Brown: Have you noticed the river has started flowing backwards?
Painter: If you hadn't told me I never would have noticed.
Father Brown: And that the sun is moving from west to east. And that those trees, instead of growing, are shrinking down into the ground. All of which suggests to me that the course of history has started to unwind, and that we are approaching the end of the world.
Painter: In that case, I'd better be going. Thanks for the tip.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: I've never been in a cell before. Except a monastery cell, of course.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: It's all so nonsensical, it must make sense.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: My son...
Flambeau: Please do not call me your son.
Father Brown: My son, you think that you are a man of the world and that I am not. But I assure you, my "innocent" ears encounter every day stories of a horror that would make your sophisticated hair stand on end. Although I wear funny clothes, and have taken certain vows, I live far more in the world than you do.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: Perhaps you think a crime horrible because you cannot imagine yourselves committing it. That isn't true, you know. What really horrifies you is the secret and shameful knowledge that you are capable of committing it. We all are, I no less than you. We were not made good people or bad people. We were made people.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: The only visible door leads to nowhere. There must be an invisible door leading somewhere.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

Father Brown: Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In a forest. Where would a wise man hide a cross? In a forest of crosses. We have a forest of crosses ready-made for us. A forest of priests; a black forest, you might say.


--Alec Guinness (as Father Brown) in Father Brown

George Bird: How do you keep smiling with a stiff upper lip?


--Alec Guinness (as George Bird) in Last Holiday