One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of...
No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggi...
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The cu...
In most commercial ways we’re a pretty forward country. In these moral ways we’re content to be a pretty backward country.
I have wondered,' said the Marquis, taking a great bite out of a slice of bread and jam, 'whether it wouldn't be better for me to do it with a knife. Most of the best things have been brought off with...
He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a towe...
Do you see this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice.'Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe...
But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way...
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.
At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise o...
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things
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...
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
It needed ten times more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of Sicily
When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible?
We’re all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something.
We are learning to do a great many clever things…The next great task will be to learn not to do them.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.