It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact th...
Is that story really true? he asked. Oh, no, said Michael, airily. It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the...
In waking to the strangeness of the world, many of us become strangers in our own homes. But home is where we start and where we shall someday return. The path between has been marked out for us by a...
If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may be a quite frivolous thing. But if you can prove it by talking a...
If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.
If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Da...
I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.
I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own. I shall say, The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe. He will say, The celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume. He will say in the most ex...
I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used.
I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking on his soul, and denying its dependence on Go...
I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is only thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more...
I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.Well hath He spoken: Swear not by thy head.Thou knowest not the hairs, though He, we read,writes that wild number in His own strange book.I cannot count the san...
His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two...
He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.
He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
He asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't
Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of vi...
Every man is dangerous, said the old man without moving, who cares only for one thing.