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

"The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life in order to keep it."

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

"Modern art has to be what is called 'intense.' it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong."

"I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense."

"A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues."

"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, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic."

"A man cannot deserve adventures, he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs."

"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, and third laughter."

"Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all."

"The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things."

"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."

"I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since."

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

"I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was."

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

"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 they are in their sunny sefishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they are not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."

"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 future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past."

"A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true."

"Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf."

"The most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love."

"To be clever enough to get all that money one must be stupid enough to want it."

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

"There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset."

"While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it."

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

"It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."

"The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."

"Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules, it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities."

"There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong."

"Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium."

"Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."

"We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders."

"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."

"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."

"Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are."

"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 thyself.We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. 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 forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget."

"I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story."

"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees."

"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 people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see."

"Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself."

"All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind."

"When people cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing they believe in anything."

"The present condition of fame is merely fashion."

"The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great."

"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."

"Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong."

"I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself. But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope."