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 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 man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that h...
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
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...
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 a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on...
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...
Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.
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...
Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by sayi...
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.
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.
Many great religions, Pagan and Christian, have insisted on wine. Only one, I think, has insisted on Soap. You will find it in the New Testament attributed to the Pharisees.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;The world was very old indeed.
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 all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him.