He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that...

Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what...

Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By...

The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his...

Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by...

Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said:”I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair...

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 afterwards;...

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane...

He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a...

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go...

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted...

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or...

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of...

When Nietszche says, “A new commandment I give to you,be hard” he is really saying, “A new commandment I give to you, be dead.” Sensibility is the definition oflife.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become...

Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.

No,’ said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; ‘I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.’ ‘Well,’ said Michael quietly, ‘will you tell me one thing?...

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man’s terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a...

There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

You don’t expect me,” he said, “to revolutionize society on this lawn?”Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.”No, I don’t,” he said; “but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism,...

Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is...

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a...

Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green,...

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs,...

How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to...

The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as...

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing...

All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome...

It’s just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when...

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as...

If you let loose a law, it willdo as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Suchsense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled.But you...

The AristocratThe Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stayAt his little place at What’sitsname (it isn’t far away).They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,And fairy scenes, and fearful...

Private lives are more important than public reputations.

The SkeletonChattering finch and water-flyAre not merrier than I;Here among the flowers I lieLaughing everlastingly.No: I may not tell the best;Surely, friends, I might have guessedDeath was but the good King’s jest,It was hid so...