This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even...
The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world. But if w...
The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of t...
The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brot...
Naturally, therefore, these people talk about 'a happy time coming'; 'the paradise of the future'; 'mankind freed from the bondage of vice and the bondage of virtue', and so on. And so also the men of...
It is quaint that people talk about separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply...
I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love.
My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they ha...
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign of St. George and the...
Why is it, he asked vaguely, that I think you are quite a decent fellow? Why do I positively like you, Gregory? He paused a moment, and then added with a sort of fresh curiosity, Is itbecause you are...
Where does a wise man hide a pebble? And the tall man answered in a low voice: On the beach. The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: Where does a wise man hide a leaf? And the other answ...
Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England.
When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.
Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad, replied Syme with perfect calm; but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.