One of the Franciscans says later, A monk should own nothing but his harp; meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song with which it was his business as a minstrel to seren...
No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking...
Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. Drink, he says...
In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds...
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.
In a word, God paints in many colors; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized this fact, and expressed it in our su...
I see everything, he cried, everything that there is. 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...
I am not good at deception,' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.Right, my boy, right,' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he...
He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning Do it again to the sun; and every even...
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, b...
Does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well as faith? That asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? You talk of religious mania! Is there no such thing as...
Confetti, bonbons, artillery.
But the whole modern world, or at any rate the whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror of plain morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds...Why...
But in practice the great difference between the medieval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which ar...
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant,