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

"..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture."

"Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are."

"We are in this fairyland on sufferance, it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world."

"Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged."

"Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."

"The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity."

"For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything."

"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."

"No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete."

"Job tries to comfort himself with philosophical pessimism like the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first time Job is comforted. . . . Job flings at God one riddle, God flings back at Job a hundred riddles, and Job is at peace. He is comforted with conundrums."

"It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don't understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it's only incredible. But I'm much more certain it didn't happen than that Parnell's ghost didn't appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand."

"The classes that wash most are those that work least."

"A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation."

"The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister."

"As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War-they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do."

"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."

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

"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."

"Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs."

"No man knows he is young while he is young."

"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 instant we remember that we forget."

"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks."

"He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man."Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth."Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!""Every man is dangerous," said the old man, without moving, "Who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself."

"They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics."

"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane."

"When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility."

"One may understand the cosmos but never the ego the self is more distant than any star."

"The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion."

"Of all modern notions the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home they say is dead decorum and routine outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks."

"Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written."

"Silence is the unbearable repartee."

"The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself."

"A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen."

"A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life and find solace in fantasy."

"When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you,be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition oflife."

"Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc."

"Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years."

"How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win."

"An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny."

"Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks."

"Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions."

"For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with "they say" or "don't you know that?" or try (and fail) to rememver the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say."

"True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare."

"In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel."

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world."

"The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other."

"True contentment is the power of getting of any situation all that there is in it."

"Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades."

"This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age."