"There is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity. You may see it in many modern religions."

"Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt."

"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."

"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 submerged sunrise of wonder."

"What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place."

"It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son."

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling."

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

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

"The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down; the progressives believe it is a clock that they themselves are winding up. But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty.- The Illustrated London News, July 10, 1920 Issue."

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."

"Oh, most unhappy man,' he cried, 'try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.'My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,' said Gregory."

"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 you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude."

"One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time."

"His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes."

"A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them."

"The true object of human life is play."

"People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make."

"It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty.The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it, we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality.In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad."

"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? Which of us has ever tried it?"

"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."

"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it."

"Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them."

"Satan fell by the force of gravity."

"Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise-too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience."

"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."

"There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable."

"{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."

"The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings."

"If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not."

"Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity."

"I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."

"If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(...) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories- generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed."

"Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty."

"Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted."

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

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."

"The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them."

"Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past."

"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"

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

"...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 fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not."

"Free verse is like free love, it is a contradiction in terms."

"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."

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

"It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers."

"The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity."

"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."

"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 intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."

"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 cut, but it keeps on growing again."One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist."