The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. …there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people on the prosaic may perpetually miss. …wisdom should not reckon on the unfor...
The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.
The modern man says, Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty. This is, logically rendered, Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.
The greatest of poems is an inventory.Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped itin the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, tolook at anything, the...
The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some da...
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and slee...
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a ste...
The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionar...
Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. T...
So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with...
Sirs, I am but a nameless man,A rhymester without a home,Yet since I come of the Wessex clayAnd carry the cross of Rome,I will even answer the mighty earlThat asked of Wessex menWhy they be meek and m...
Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It's that we have only seen the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That...
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
Quebrantaría yo veinte juramentos, con tal de darle a usted en la cabeza. Ese modo que tiene usted de encender el cigarro, por ejemplo, basta para hacer que un sacerdote quebrante el secreto de la con...
Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in...
Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong tur...
Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a...
Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in th...
Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty...