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...
Thrift is poetic because it is creative.
The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism...
The vision which has been so faintly suggested in these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and women; li...
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study l...
The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.
The men of the east may search the scrolls, For sure fates and fame, But the men that drink the blood of God go singing to their shame.
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 Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since be...
The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, s...
That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats...
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...
Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist...
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane...
My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, My mother, drunk or sober.
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, I will not hit you if you do not hit me; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each ot...
It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane....
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.