To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger....

No man knows he is young while he is young.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?...

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other–the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea,...

The present importance of the Book of Job cannot be expressed adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting of ancient books. We may almost say of the Book of Job that it...

Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.

The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the...

One definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven...

Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.

Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know...

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity. But there was just enough in him of the...

Each thing that obeys law [has] the glory and isolation of the anarchist,

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing...

When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to...

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles...

How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as...

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,...

The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving...

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face – that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defense of life; that would delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do...

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...

Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between...

The man who said, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,” put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall...

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong. However, he’s often wrong about what is right.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the...

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.

If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

…the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

Can you not see, […] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul...

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or...

All habits are bad habits. (…) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

…this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.