The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
When we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belon...
You do believe it,' he said. 'You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don't you feel in your heart that these...
When Nietszche says, A new commandment I give to you,be hard he is really saying, A new commandment I give to you, be dead. Sensibility is the definition oflife.
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.
We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction, he said. We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human...
We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character easy to read, we are reading into it our own character.
We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipice...
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; was...
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the...
There fared a mother driven forthOut of an inn to roam;In the place where she was homelessAll men are at home.The crazy stable close at hand,With shaking timber and shifting sand,Grew a stronger thing...
There are some refusals which, though they may be done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only harden bu...
There are some people, nevertheless — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. ... We think that for a general about...
There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.
The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace;...
The publisher said of somebody, 'That man will get on; he believes in himself.' [...] I said to him, 'Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of m...
The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not 'artists,' the whole was nevertheless artistic. That youn...
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 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...