We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.
The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.
The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle, pursued the policeman. The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.
The sages have a hundred maps to giveThat trace their crawling cosmos like a treeThey rattle reason out through many a sieveThat stores the sand but lets the gold go free
The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, ma...
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The adoration of Christ had been a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, in that sense may be said to begi...
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far m...
Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but ho...
People, if you have any prayers,Say prayers for me:And lay me under a Christian stoneIn that lost land I thought my own,To wait till the holy horn is blown,And all poor men are free.
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that...
Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creat...
Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old on...
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love i...
Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word indefinable with the word vague. If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as indefinable we...
Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.
Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most int...