I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like...
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will ne...
And well may God with the serving-folkCast in His dreadful lot;Is not He too a servant,And is not He forgot?For was not God my gardenerAnd silent like a slave;That opened oaks on the uplandsOr thicket...
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible...
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air;...
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely hap...
There are degrees of seriousness, replied Syme. I have never doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might w...
Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many pe...
The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers.
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages,...
He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration.
At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, Life is not worth living. We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious eff...
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To...
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn,Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born.With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings,The devil's wal...
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the mater...
The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it...