No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were a...
I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and th...
He is a man, I think, he said, who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth.Dangerous! he said. You don't know little Quin,...
Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose...
A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hears men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on grow...
The modern mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical, when it has just called any pra...
Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer th...
Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.
I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
no life of faith can be lived privately. There must be an overflow into the lives of others.
A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare's tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare's comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the...
Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, l...
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we hav...