What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be d...
I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must alwayshave been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because...
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else......
But this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific meth...
The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterward...
Inside I am really bursting with boyish merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I can't leave off.
For most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as t...
But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that.
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundatio...
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
Worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.
I was waiting for you, said Gregory. Might I have a moment's conversation?Certainly. About what? asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the...
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calml...
We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of...
Those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.