"A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition."

"St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, 'I have understood every page I ever read'."

"A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching."

"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 law, I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden."

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

"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 is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."

"The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those opposite to the fact, it is actually our truisms that are untrue."

"Life is indeed terribly complicated-to a man who has lost his principles."

"I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it."

"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache."

"All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."

"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers."

"Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much."

"He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it."

"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 to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons."

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."