"There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner."

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

"One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys sel-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism."

"It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands."

"The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant."

"The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born."

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."

"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 us but honor and death."

"Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers."

"I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles."

"The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true."

"Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough."

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read."

"He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican."

"The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole."

"Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality because reality is a spirit."

"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."

"England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on, the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men, who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product."

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act."

"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men but one and he has saved not only his soul but his life."

"What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table."

"The dreadful joy Thy Son has sentIs heavier than any care;We find, as Cain his punishment,Our pardon more than we can bear."

"London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation."

"We make our friends we make our enemies but God makes our next-door neighbour."

"Thrift is poetic because it is creative, waste is unpoetic because it is waste."

"We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws."

"IF I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven."

"When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude."

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

"Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."

"A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying."

"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."

"He understood (what so many fautlessly polite people do not understand) that a stiff apology is a second insult. He understood that the injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged, he wants to be healed because he has been hurt."

"It will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact."

"If I had one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence...the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis, that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven."

"There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell."

"Democracy means government by the uneducated while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."

"Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it."

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

"Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?"

"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."

"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."

"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost."

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die."

"...It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe."

"The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul."

"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."

"The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact."

"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 and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it."

"Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile."