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.
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.
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.
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
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.
When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
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.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
