The romantic seeks only to get his head into the heavens. The rationalist seeks to get the heavens into his head – and it is his head that splits.
Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he...
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...
My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.
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...
It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to...
Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity a a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.
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 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 know the Unknown God, said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. I know his name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among...
I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.
I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different...
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...
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...
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions.
They are constantly colonists and emigrants ; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of something...
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.