Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. He that will lose his life, the same shall save it, is not a piece of mysticism for...
But it's my reading of human nature that a man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby.
But as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren't a priest.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally w...
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...
Paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.
You! he cried. You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and butt...
Wherever men are still theological there is still some chance of their being logical.
When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special...
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?
We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.
Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling o...
There was one special thing you promised me at the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by the end of it.
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I o...
Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion involves that you will reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear...
The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man fee...
Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?
One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.