At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this...

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as...

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape...

The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful...

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.

Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big...

It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men’smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy...

The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you...

There nearly always is a method in madness.

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land...

An artist is identical with an anarchist,’ he cried. ‘You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment...

My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the...

There was something that He hid from all men, when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing...

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the...

When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward – in a word,...

[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing–such as making love.

For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears,...

What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers...

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to...

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices...

Our friend Tuesday,” said the President in a deep voice at once of quietude and volume, “our friend Tuesday doesn’t seem to grasp the idea. He dresses up like a gentleman, but he seems to...

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

I always like a dog so long as he isn’t spelled backward.

England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole...

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place,...

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

Job is an optimist. He shakes the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a...

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill...

I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.

A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have...

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the...

Do you see this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice.’Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than...

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

, 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 it...

The vulgar modern argument used against religion, and lately against common decency, would be absolutely fatal to any idea of liberty. It is perpetually said that because there are a hundred religions claiming to be...

There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.

But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying,...

You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than...