The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating and drinking.
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of u...
If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dr...
All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem a...
The primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting , to doubt a little more, to doubt...
Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.
For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom...
Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Sur...
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
It will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds...
The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasent. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicage; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. Bu...
The devil takes us to the top of an exceeding high mountain and makes us dizzy; but God lets us look at the mountain.