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 only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being...
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 are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
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...
The past is not what it was.
The man who said, Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed, put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he sha...
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise s...
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely...
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a s...
Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seeme...
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left-- sanity.
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've s...
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under...
As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.