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 only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
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...
The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.
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...
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...
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.
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...
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of th...
Inside I am really bursting with boyish merriment; but I acted the paralytic Professor so well, that now I can't leave off.
But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that.
Worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.
The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.