When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities…it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These...

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body,...

The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of...

He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: thatpeople do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it mayor may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only...

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon...

Paradox – Truth standing on her head to get attention.

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting , to...

He is a man, I think,” he said, “who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.”Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth.”Dangerous!” he said. “You don’t...

…even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make...

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities...

And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a...

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young...

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of...

{We} have not to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule; rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can’t.

There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market-gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very...

The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have...

If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he...

A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree...

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this...

Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.

Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.

I will go forth as a real outlaw,” he said, “and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.

How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow,till he finds it the humble lantern...

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the...

Now in sober truth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more universal than we are might appear to...

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative...

The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took...

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing – and he won’t be missed either.

Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness, we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as...

If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which...

I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any...