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...

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at...

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

…the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

In the modern world, we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not gotten tired of Christianity; they have never...

Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham...

of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt,...

Thou shalt not steal.

…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 methods. The...

She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.

And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells’s indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that...

If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill...

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that...

I have a suspicion that you are all mad,’ said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; ‘but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as green banners.