A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The...
The obvious thing to say of his appearance was that he would have been extremely handsome if he had not been entirely bald. But, indeed, that would itself be a rather bald way of putting it. Fantastic...
The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
Paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white...
A man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.
Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does...
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusi...
When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
We must have several word-signs, said Syme seriously -- words that we are likely to want, fine shades of meaning. My favourite word is 'coeval.' What's yours?Do stop playing the goat, said the Profess...
Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
There’d be a lot less scandal if people didn’t idealize sin and pose as sinners.
There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, yo...
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the no...
Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a consi...
Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of rep...