It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materiali...
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good...
If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly...
I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it it really nothing but a sort of new religion and an...
I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the...
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are —...
He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
He asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't
Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples...
Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.
Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen...
There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon.